#58 Buck Sexton - Twitter Files, Dr. Fauci, Epstein, ChatGPT, Education System, and Title 42

Buck Sexton is a former CIA analyst and currently an American radio host, author, and conservative co-host of The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. This episode covers a lot ground. We get into Buck's former life as a CIA analyst and how that informs his public works. We discuss the expiration of Title 42 and what that means for the border crisis and asylum seekers. Buck explains how the modern mass media has developed over time and where disinformation collides with the free press. Shawn and Buck touch on the education system and the future of AI. From the Twitter Files to the Epstein case–we tackle these current events head on. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://helixsleep.com/srs https://mypatriotsupply.com https://blackbuffalo.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://bubsnaturals.com - USE CODE "SHAWN" https://learshawn.com - CALL 800-741-0551 Information contained within Lear Capital’s website is for general educational purposes and is not investment, tax, or legal advice. Past performance may not be indicative of future results. Consult with your tax attorney or financial professional before making an investment decision. Buck Sexton Links: Podcast - https://www.clayandbuck.com/ Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-clay-travis-and-buck-sexton-show/ Spotify - spoti.fi/3ujUe1R Book - https://a.co/d/gz9PlU2 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bucksexton/ Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  On October 2nd.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Tom Cruise is.

• 0:10Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 0:16Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 0:24Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not admitted without parent.

• 0:30Speaker 04

  There is so much NFL on ESPN right now. Monday Night Football, plus pregame and postgame. NFL Live, NFL Primetime. Everything you need to stay on top of every game, every week. Unbelievable. And now, NFL Network is on the ESPN app. More football, more coverage, more ways to watch. Football's on, all season long, on ESPN and streaming on the ESPN app.

• 1:01Shawn Ryan?

  Ladies and gentlemen, I owe you a very big thank you. Today, I saw that Sean Ryan Show is sitting in the number four slot out of all podcasts on Spotify. That's not number four in a particular category. That's not number four in society and culture. That is number four out of an estimated 8 million-plus podcasts. Thank you for listening. Thank you for watching.

• 1:31Shawn Ryan?

  If you would have told me that this show would be sitting in the number four slot after only 57 episodes,

• 1:44Shawn Ryan?

  I likely would have called you an insane person. But here we are. Thanks to you. Thanks to you. Thank you to the guests who come here and they show vulnerability, and they talk about topics that nobody wants to talk about, and they bring hope to the world, they uncover corruption, we shine a spotlight on evil. And it's just been amazing. It's been a hell of a journey. And lastly, I want to thank my team. My team is family to me. We run a very close knit operation here. There are only six of us. That's it. And each member on this team is the absolute best at what

• 2:28Shawn Ryan?

  they do. And I love them. Thank you. We're number four. But um, today I got my good friend Buck Sexton on the show. We decided to do a different type of episode. We're talking about just having a conversation about some of the current events that are going on both in the country and in the world. We kind of kick it off with some of the Twitter file stuff with Elon Musk, move into Jeffrey Epstein, talk a little bit about that. And then we go into a variety of other topics. But if you want to check out Buck, I'm sure you've

• 3:09Shawn Ryan?

  heard of him. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton shows on 500 plus stations throughout the country. They are literally everywhere. So check them out. Please, if you get anything out of this, share the episode, sign up for our newsletter, leave us a review on both Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, please welcome Buck Sexton to the Sean Ryan Show. Buck Sexton, welcome to the Sean Ryan Show, man. Dude, it's an honor to be here. Thank you. It's been a long time coming. Yeah, man, I'm a, I'm a fan of the show. It's fun to do a show you're a fan of. So

• 3:53Shawn Ryan?

  you do great work here. Thank you. I'm a huge fan of you guys, too. So let me introduce you real quick. American radio host, the follow on, you and Clay Travis, the follow on for the Rush Limbaugh Show, political commentator, podcaster, writer, and former CIA intelligence officer. You were an analyst over there. You got a bachelor's degree in political science. You joined the CIA in 2005 and

• 4:18Shawn Ryan?

  Now you're here.

• 4:19Speaker 06

  Now I'm here. It's quite a journey.

• 4:20Shawn Ryan?

  So we got a lot to unpack today. I want to hit the Twitter files. I've heard all about them. A lot of us don't have time to dive into all that stuff and read all that information. I know you are spun up on it, so let's dive into that. And recently, there was the Epstein drop in the Wall Street Journal. Like to cover some of that. And then if we get to it, which maybe we'll start with this Title 42, that's expiring here, what, in a week?

• 4:49Speaker 06

  May 11th, Title 42 is set to expire, yeah.

• 4:52Shawn Ryan?

  And then we'll get into some CIA stuff.

• 4:56Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 4:56Shawn Ryan?

  And maybe what's going on with the Bidens.

• 4:59Speaker 06

  Writing some badass memos, drinking some badass coffee back at Lengur. We'll do it.

• 5:05Shawn Ryan?

  But everybody on this show gets a gift.

• 5:11Speaker 06

  Oh, for me? I thought that's for the audience. Thank you. Even me, man. That's amazing.

• 5:15Shawn Ryan?

  You even get a gift.

• 5:16Speaker 06

  Thank you so much. Oh. Vigilance Elite gummy. I mean, I've been hearing about these. Now I get to actually taste them. This is phenomenal. Thank you so much.

• 5:25Shawn Ryan?

  Legal in all 50 states.

• 5:28Speaker 06

  Sealyac Disease Approved. Thank you so much. I appreciate that.

• 5:31Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome. But where do you want to start? Do you want to start with the Twitter files? Do you want to start with Title 42?

• 5:39Speaker 06

  We could, we could do. You were fired up about the Twitter files thing. I am too. I just think it's interesting that something that should be the biggest story about the media within the general media ecosystem is almost entirely ignored.

• 5:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:55Speaker 06

  Right? And we know why, but it's just fascinating. This should be a huge thing, right? This should be enormous. This should be Watergate, which people talk about all the time now. But because of the political implications of it, it is overwhelmingly ignored.

• 6:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, they claim to be a... Balanced platform back in the day, but turns out 99% of the political donations from the company went to Democrats.

• 6:24Speaker 06

  So you know what's fascinating? If you step back and look at the evolution of our media, and I actually, I take it back to the very beginning. Can I do that? I'm gonna go, I do like history a lot, so I spend far too much time in my life, have spent a lot of time wandering around. I like history books that are on sale on the like little racks that no one else is looking at in old dusty stores. But if you look at the origins of American media and journalism, there was always an understanding that it was partisan, it was for a purpose. If you look at what the founding fathers dealt with, newspapers were taking very explicit

• 7:08Speaker 06

  political positions, and whether it was federalist, anti-federalist, so on, aligned with an ideology, right? Even to the point where the American Aurora, for example, in Philadelphia, while Washington, George Washington's in his first term, is saying that he's a traitor who wants to be king, and this is all going to some of the early debates around the Constitution. So the notion that we used to have this thing of an objective media that was just presenting you the facts, that is actually the initial disinformation in all this. That's not true. That was never true. You get into the 20th century, and you get into the evolution of true mass media, right? I mean, yeah, newspapers, fine, we got the printing press, we get to newspapers, but

• 7:53Speaker 06

  once you have radio, which is what I do now, obviously, it's my primary day-to-day job, but then the evolution of television and later on the internet, there was a dominance established of the narrative being, now it was Democrat, but Democrats were different, obviously, 50 years ago than they are now. Well, this whole notion of journalism as an objective, almost a science. And that's something I'll return to as well. The people who want to control you and want you to just shut up and listen. Throughout, certainly, modern history, look at science. We'll talk about this in the context of COVID. But journalists were objective. That's not really true, obviously. We know that now.

• 8:36Speaker 06

  And we know it in part because of the evolution of talk radio. I now sit every day as in the slot, we say in the house that Rush built with Clay Travis, my co-host, who's awesome. And we do the best we can to serve Rush's audience. But Rush Limbaugh, some other talk radio hosts, the internet, Fox News, Drudge Report, which used to be amazing. Were you ever a Drudge Report guy? I was. Drudge Report was my homepage, starting from when I was a William F. Buckley-reading college kid. I was all about the Drudge Report. So I bring all this up because you had this break in the control of the narrative,

• 9:18Speaker 06

  where all of a sudden you had not just alternative voices, but powerful alternative voices, whether it was Bill Clinton's affair, in the case of the Drudge Report, or obviously all the things Rush dealt with. There was finally a little bit of a counterbalance. And of course, the left hated this. The left is authoritarian, and I call them commies for reasons we can get into. They hated this. So then it brings us to social media. I know we've done a whole... But what happened is with the evolution, the early stages of the internet, finally it seemed like we were approaching something like a balanced playing field, right? Everybody had a blog, and everybody could voice their opinions. And some of the websites, the upstarts, became very, very popular.

• 10:03Speaker 06

  But what we realized was that even in this massive information...

• 10:09Speaker 06

  I don't want to say information warfare space, but it can be this massive information superhighway of the internet. There are toll roads, there are choke points, there are ways that you can establish through what is effectively a monopoly, total information dominance. And I've been worried about this even back in the time when I was in the CIA as an analyst, you know, reading my reports and doing my analyst things. Because when you see the power, you know, there used to be CBS, ABC, NBC News, there used to be all these news entities. Walter Cronkite says we're losing the Vietnam War. Boom, done, we're losing, right? That was perception. Now, it wasn't really that simple, but there was a power that they had that had ebbed away.

• 10:50Speaker 06

  The power that they have replaced that with, with the dominance of social media platforms, which are not just Democrat aligned, which are truly left wing evangelist run and operated, which is what we had seen, far outstripped, I think, what they had had, let's say, in the, you know, the eighties going into the nineties or at a previous era. Because they set these things up under the promise, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, go down the list, right? And obviously, Facebook owns Instagram, so same thing there. They set them up on the promise, hey, guys, we're just, you know, we're here to provide a platform for free speech. We're here for everybody.

• 11:31Speaker 06

  But in the back, without people seeing with the algorithms, a whole bunch of things, they were already shifting and shaping the conversation, shifting and shaping the conversation. And it's almost more pernicious, right? Because at least if you're reading the New York Times, you're reading the New York Times. If you're Googling something, you're saying, hey, I think, I think this politician's lying to me. And you go into Google and you try to find, and it just doesn't show up. Or something shows up that even says, oh, no, that's not true. Or like, here's a fact check that shows he didn't. What's more, what's more damaging to public discourse and to the pursuit of truth? So that brings me all the way to Twitter. And I just think that's a necessary.

• 12:06Shawn Ryan?

  So you're saying this has always been imbalanced?

• 12:07Speaker 06

  Oh, absolutely.

• 12:09Shawn Ryan?

  And it's always been imbalanced where?

• 12:13Shawn Ryan?

  Democrats are pretty much on top.

• 12:15Speaker 06

  It was, so it was always there. What happened, and I'll tell you how you know this. There was an evolution, because you know, I got in, so I got out of the, I think I officially resigned from the agency 2010, maybe it was 2011, I don't even really remember now.

• 12:35Speaker 06

  And I went into media right away, which is another thing, we can talk about how that happened. It was kind of a, you know, bolt of lightning, wasn't a thing I was planning on doing. But even early on, I could tell, because there would be, you could tell that there were people who would get more traction on the left than they should for certain ideas and things. You could look at what would trend, you could tell there was an editorial bias, for sure. On, and Twitter's a platform I know the best. I've never been a, like, Facebook native, like, I've never really been deep into the Facebook, Instagram world. You know, I'm not a, I'm not a beautiful woman who can get a million followers by posting selfies, so unfortunately, which is, I know, a shock to your audience. So I've been much more of a Twitter guy.

• 13:19Speaker 06

  They were, all along, they were skewing the playing field. But what happened, and you could tell this also because people get suspended, and it was, and they, originally it was you get suspended from Twitter in the Jack Dorsey era, if you were conservative. And then they would, and then there'd be an outcry, like, why was this guy suspended for this? And then they'd say, oh, it was a mistake. I don't know if you, if you were even paying attention to this back then. It used to be, oh no, it was a mistake, because people started to say, only conservatives are getting banned, only people on the right, only traditional view Americans, however you want to describe it. They were the only ones getting banned. So they would always say it was a mistake. And then they started to say, it's a violation of Terms of Service. And then they started to say, well, we don't even have to share our Terms of Service with

• 14:04Speaker 06

  you, we just decide. And then it was like, you're banned and shut up, right? It was, it was, the slope was very slippery on this. And the pivot point for them, or the tipping point for them, was Donald Trump. Because I was at CNN in 2015, 2016, as mostly doing counterterrorism analysis on TV, which was a fascinating thing at CNN, because I'm like, yeah, the jihadists who are killing all of us, like, they're bad guys, we need to stop them. There'd be other CNN people who are like, I don't know, maybe we should hear them out. I think, oh, I've got a whole story about that. Yeah, I mean, they were, the, the left-wing lunacy at CNN was already very present. But on Trump, getting back to the Trump and the social media platforms

• 14:49Speaker 06

  and the Twitter files, Trump was able to use social media in a way that no one on the right in politics had up to that point. And his ability to go straight to the people with the message was, I think, along with a number of other factors, why he was able to create this political phenomenon and win in 2016, and why it was such a surprise. You remember, the New York Times had that thing, 97% chance on Election Day that Hillary Clinton wins. How could they have missed it by that much? How could they get it so wrong? Trump, because of his media background and what he had done in his life, understood that if he could get around, now, he also would go through the filters, he loves to

• 15:34Speaker 06

  talk to the New York Times, Maggie Haberman, etc. But he would be able to speak to people and set the narrative of the news, honestly, set the agenda without having that filter. And that was a game changer. And so what happened is Dorsey, Zuckerberg, all of them, started to get immense social pressure from the activists within, within those different platforms and outside of them too, right? But the people that work for them and around them, and then these other, you know, left-wing groups, and the pressure was, how dare you? You can never let this happen again. They are spreading disinformation. They are a

• 16:16Speaker 06

  threat to democracy. So now we have to openly weaponize these, the most powerful media platforms in existence, which are the social media platforms, particularly Google, by the way, which we've talked about, against one side of the political aisle. So that's the evolution of it. So Trump kind of broke it out in the open.

• 16:35Shawn Ryan?

  So rewind it just real quick. If there was always an imbalance, why do you think? The balance never changes. Why haven't Republicans or conservative donors or why hasn't this changed at all? Why aren't we combating it?

• 16:51Speaker 06

  Well, to be fair, I think that's always the key question. Elon, for example, is changing it right now. So I would think that that's now. It's a, you know, one thing we debate on the radio show. Clay and I talk about this. We want to celebrate our wins, but it also sometimes feels like we're always making goal line stands, right? Oh, well, you know, Facebook and Twitter kicked a sitting president off the platform. Like, I think people have to remember, even foreign governments, I usually don't, you know, I usually don't give a shit what a foreign government thinks about anything going on here, but even the ones that didn't like Trump and would have been, were like, hold on a second, guys. He is the president.

• 17:33Speaker 06

  You're not allowing him the access to what is, at least in perception, a public utility. I know it's technically not, these are private platforms, but there's a whole other conversation about what about all the regulation? Like, I can't just go on radio and say anything I want, but on social media, they can do anything they want. So I do think that, I think they reached the point, if you would have asked me that question even a couple of years ago, I would have said, it's a little bit like, why is it that there are more avowed Marxists on the faculties of top American colleges and universities than Republicans? And it's because, to be a leftist, leftists operate in the ecosystem of academia, of corporate America, like an invasive species, right?

• 18:18Speaker 06

  Why do you have to worry about an invasive species? Because they don't want to coexist. There's no interest in, they want to, you know, this is the fish that wants to eat the other fish and only have this kind of fish, and that is it. And that is how they operate, by the way, in the federal government bureaucratic ranks as well. It's how they operated at the CIA, certainly on the analyst side to the degree that they can. It's how they operate in, find me a place where they achieve dominance. Part of it is the psychology of people on the right. We like to be. We think of things like fair play and principles. And even more than that on this conversation, we like to be left alone. Like, we're happy to do our jobs, right? You know, if I worked at a lumber mill, as a conservative, I just show up. I want to do the best job I can at the lumber mill.

• 19:03Speaker 06

  I, you know, I get paid for my labor. I go home. If you're of the mindset of these activist libs, you show up and you're like, you know, where's, where's the, you know, the trans agenda flag on the door? Or like, why isn't everyone at the lumber mill sharing their pronouns? Because this is the mentality. And I think we've finally woken up to that. And we've certainly seen it on the social media platforms now where they just, I mean, they openly decided that the Trump thing was the crossing of the Rubicon in so many ways. They openly decided that they were going to suppress. And that, I mean, I'm one of the loudest critics of the, because it's been really damaging what they've done to the reputation of the CIA. It's really damaging what they've done to the intelligence community.

• 19:48Speaker 06

  They have fundamentally, you know, with, with the Hunter Biden laptop, which I know is part of the Twitter files, they have fundamentally undermined those institutions. And it will take generations to repair it, if it's even repairable at this point.

• 20:01Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think it was? Do you think there was one particular thing that Trump did why they banned him? Because, and the reason I'm asking, because there's been a lot of, you always hear, he was inciting violence, he was inciting violence. But, you know, then you have all these other heads of states, Iran, Nigeria, Ethiopia, that Twitter did not delete these tweets. And here's some of them. Here's, here's a tweet. Israel is a cancerous tumor and they need to be eradicated and removed.

• 20:40Shawn Ryan?

  There's a bunch of these.

• 20:42Speaker 06

  There's an important maxim. I've referred to this as wartime conservatism. People will say, they'll just say, "He knows what time it is," or "She knows what time it is." People will say that it's based, but the recognition, if there's something that is similar to what the left thinks woke is, whatever that is on the right, meaning that you are activated and mobilized, right? The first thing everyone has to understand is that the mindset of the leftist authoritarian is that they do things differently for different people or in different circumstances because

• 21:27Speaker 06

  they can. They do not seek to be even-handed or principled. They are not aspiring to approach people with fairness or decency. They treat the right and left differently because they can. It is pure power politics. And so, when you talk about, "Well, how is it that, you know, the Iranian mullahs," and, you know, I'm sure, I don't know if the Kim dynasty, if they're really active on Twitter, but whoever it is, "How is it that they can continue to tweet, and the sitting president isn't, because they don't really care about the Iranian mullah, because he doesn't threaten

• 22:12Speaker 06

  their power here, and they don't really care about human rights either? They care about Donald Trump because he stands in the way of what they're trying to accomplish and the power they're trying to seize." So, the destruction of whatever they're espousing in terms of fairness, balance, equity, that's the standard. The hypocrisy is the point.

• 22:33Shawn Ryan?

  I understand that. The reason I'm bringing this up, and that quote was from Iran, and so, I want to read the whole quote, I'm gonna read a couple of them, just to show.

• 22:41Speaker 06

  Sure, yeah, go for it.

• 22:42Shawn Ryan?

  And we'll put screenshots of the tweets on up. So this is from, this is from Iran. Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West. Asia region that has, that has to be removed and eradicated. It is possible it will happen. Not removed. In October of 2020, the former Malaysian prime minister said it was right for Muslims to kill millions of French people. This tweet was removed, but the prime minister was not banned from Twitter. President of Nigeria incited violence against pro, I'm gonna screw this up, Baphra groups.

• 23:21Speaker 06

  Baphra, yeah, the separatist group there.

• 23:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Those of us in the fields for 30 months who went through the war, we will treat them in the language they understand. Twitter deleted the tweet, but didn't ban them. In October 21, 2021, Twitter allowed Ethiopian Prime Minister Abay Ahmed to call on citizens to take up arms against the Tigray region. Twitter allowed the tweet to remain up and did not ban the prime minister. So there's, those are all inciting violence that Twitter didn't care about. And so I don't think Trump had anything even close to any of those tweets.

• 24:06Speaker 06

  They're liars. That's what you see. They're liars. And we all know it now. And everyone knows it now. So it's out in the open, which is a good thing. There's no doubt about it. And that's why on the Hunter Biden laptop issue, I was, I was shouting about this from the very beginning, because, I mean, I, I worked for some, I worked for Hayden, who was CIA director. I worked for Morrell when he was acting director. Now, I didn't, I wasn't, I wasn't, you know, walking in and out of their office every day, obviously, but, you know, they were chain of command. I mean, that's who ultimately, as a DI analyst, was at, was at the top of the hierarchy and were supposed to.

• 24:48Speaker 06

  Have respect for them, at least insofar as they really cared about the mission and there was something more than just petty partisan nonsense going on with them. And after the, um, this whole phenomenon of the Twitter files and everything is only possible because Elon bought Twitter. Uh, Elon bought Twitter and, and I think this is, this was because, uh, of a number of things, the Babylon Bee, um, where, you know, Seth Dillon, do you ever see the Babylon Bee stuff? I do. They're great. I mean, they're doing really fun stuff. Babylon Bee guys are doing a great job. Seth got locked out of his Twitter account and he and Neilon know each other. And he's just like, what do you mean? And it was over Rachel Levine as man of the year was basically the tweet.

• 25:30Speaker 06

  Rachel Levine, as you know, is a transgender man who was, uh, like an admiral in HHS or something, I forget, you know, Health and Human Services and had been called woman of the year, which should be an insult to any person who lives in reality because this is neither a woman nor the woman of the year. But he got locked out of his Twitter account because of that. Okay. So for the objective, and I think this is important to what we're saying about how they're liars, for the objective statement of fact, Twitter destroyed his, destroyed his account, locked him out forever. And for different, uh, media entities, uh, you know, commentators, that can really hurt your business. I mean, there, there's real consequences to this. It's not just like, oh, well now I can't, you know, post on the local message board or something. It really matters. It's meaningful.

• 26:15Speaker 06

  So that then also brings the, brings me back to the, um, the whole era of the deplatforming that occurred right around the 2020 election. And you had the, uh, 51, was it 50, I keep forgetting, it was 51, right? Former intelligence officials who

• 26:38Speaker 06

  Signed something that they had to know was false and moronic. They hadn't seen the laptop data. I knew people who had mirrored it and were offered it to CNN, offered it, said, hey, guys, here we go. Dive through it. Find me the Russian disinformation in here. And also think about what a, if the story wasn't true, leaving the laptop at the, and you know, Hunter Biden's a guy's a, he's a crackhead and he's a total mess. I mean, the notion of him forgetting a laptop somewhere and never picking it up is completely credible.

• 27:13Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about what was on that laptop.

• 27:15Speaker 06

  Sure. I mean, Hunter Biden.

• 27:20Speaker 06

  So there's the, there's the salacious stuff that has made its way into the realm of the, you know, New York Post front page and all this sort of stuff. And then, and to be clear, there's people over there who've done great reporting on it. Miranda Devine has done awesome reporting on it and she, they were right. They were right on the Hunter Biden laptop and deserve a tremendous amount of credit. But I think that because the salacious stuff just sticks in the mind more, you know, Hunter wearing a boa in his tighty whities with a couple of hookers, you know, I mean, you've seen this stuff too. It's just, I mean, the guy's really depraved. I mean, he's a person who's really in need of, of, of serious assistance.

• 27:58Speaker 06

  And there's the part of it that we're just saying, there's just that interest in someone who's in the state of collapse, I think, or who is a public figure that has messed up his life so much. But then there's the important stuff, which I think is what, you know, you're alluding to, which is where was Hunter getting his money from?

• 28:19Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 28:20Speaker 06

  Right?

• 28:20Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think all this stuff was a cover up for that? They wanted to bring kind of the sexual, the sexual.

• 28:28Shawn Ryan?

  Whatever you want to call it, the sexual stuff up to kind of breeze over the important stuff in the media.

• 28:35Speaker 06

  Ah, I think it's a challenge because even people who want the real story of Hunter Biden and really the corruption that the Democrat Party completely allows and encourages at the very highest level, whether it was the Clinton Foundation, which was clearly a pay for play scheme. I'm on record, I mean, I was trying to, you know, fight commies over at CNN on the air. I mean, I would say, you know, what, because they would talk about the Clinton Foundation. They would say, well, it's a charity. And I said, well, it's not really, I mean, when you're getting paid $800,000 a speech and flying around the world on private jets, like, you're not really operating a charity, right? Bill Clinton made 800 grand from, I think it was a Russian-backed bank, was the most he ever got paid for one speech.

• 29:19Speaker 06

  They were clearly peddling influence, at least the belief in the people writing the checks that they were selling influence. And I said, well, what if I, what if I'm in an elected office? I used to say this on the air. And my wife were, were all of a sudden a painter. And I'm not taking any money from anybody, but she's selling paintings for a million dollars apiece. That's what the market will bear. That's what, they go into her gallery, they pay her a million dollars. Would that raise any eyebrows for anybody? Because it's effectively what the Clinton Foundation, Hunter Biden's doing that. And they won't disclose who's buying these paintings. I mean, think about that for a moment. You come up with a theoretical to show how crazy, how dishonest, and how cynical all

• 30:04Speaker 06

  of this is. And it's just a matter of time before they actually do the thing that you're using as the example of how corrupt and dishonest they are. So he is making these finger paintings, whatever they are, for $50,000 each. Everyone can check that, that's real. The sitting president's son is doing that. But on the point of where he got his money from and what's on the Hunter Biden laptop.

• 30:25Speaker 06

  He wasn't getting paid by the Swiss. He wasn't getting checks from, you know, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Thailand or something. I mean, you know, maybe that would raise some eyebrows too. I don't. He's getting it from China and Ukraine. He was getting it from our biggest adversary and he was getting it from a country where his dad, as vice president, was specifically head of the foreign policy portfolio for the Obama administration in that country at a time when that country was on the brink as it was and USAID in support was basically live or die. And Joe Biden is on video bragging about how he fired the chief corruption prosecutor

• 31:08Speaker 06

  in that country? Like, the worst, this is what, we'll talk about this with Epstein too. There are conspiracy theorists and there are coincidence theorists, right? Everything is a coincidence. And everything with Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden and his dad is supposed to be just a coincidence. This is where the money comes from. This is how it's being handled. This is what's going on.

• 31:28Shawn Ryan?

  How did the FBI get involved in all this?

• 31:31Speaker 06

  So, one thing that I think everybody has to start to get acclimated to or aware of, better way of saying it, is the counterterrorism apparatus that you and I were familiar with back in the day of the GWOT, right? The Global War on Terror. And the, the government agencies with all of their resources and all their personnel who are trying to find ways to justify their, their day to day, particularly on the, you know, the civilian intel agency

• 32:10Speaker 06

  side. That hasn't gone away. And a lot of the language, a lot of the bureaucratic approach that was used in the Global War on Terror to deal with, you know, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab, go down the list, all these different groups, you're noticing that there are domestic, there are domestic focuses now from FBI and all the rest of them that mirror the language, the surveillance tactics, the, even the, some of the threat level and concern. I mean, somehow we have transitioned from

• 32:52Speaker 06

  We're all on the same page as a country that Bin Laden, Al Qaeda are a mortal threat and are avowed enemies, and we gotta just put aside some of the political stuff for a while, we take care of them. You fast forward 20 years, what does the counterterrorism apparatus of the United States government say is the biggest threat to this country right now? And as you well know, it is white nationalist, white supremacist, right-wing Republicans, basically. And that's, they connect, these are not the same thing at all, but they connect these things purposefully.

• 33:30Speaker 06

  And we are at a time now when, you know, the FBI has, at least at a senior level and the intelligence agencies, they have chosen a side. And the side is not with the Constitution and the people. The side is with what I call the apparatus, the machinery of the elites and their power and how they run this country. You ask how the FBI got involved, the FBI realized that the surveillance capabilities of the social media companies exceed anything that the federal government is really able to do. Because people don't realize how easy it is for the acts, right?

• 34:15Speaker 06

  It's one thing, if you think you're being watched, maybe you'll have a courier in Afghanistan and it'll be on, you know, you'll be riding a donkey across the mountains because you don't want the satellites to pick things up, whatever. But if, one, you think you have no reason to be watched, and two, you're on a commercial platform that shouldn't be just open to the whims of the federal government to snoop on, you'll be very free, you'll share your thoughts, you'll talk to your buddies, you'll talk to your friends. Well, now, sharing your thoughts and buddies, sharing your thoughts with buddies and friends about what you think happened in an election or what happened in the government, I mean, this has just happened too. I mean, this, as we sit here, this is a new phenomenon.

• 34:57Speaker 06

  They have established that having the wrong beliefs and thoughts about an election and saying things about what you want to happen or think should have happening is sedition, which is basically treason. So we are heading down a very dark pathway with that. And it is, the train is no longer out in the distance, you know, you're not just kind of hearing the faint sounds of the train on the tracks. It's, you're feeling the rumble now, it is coming. It's coming in this 2024 election. I'm deeply concerned about how this is going to play out for all of us.

• 35:38Speaker 06

  The fact that the FBI and the intelligence agencies have, whether it was with Russia collusion, Hunter Biden laptop, the Twitter files, they have become much more like domestic intelligence services in other countries. You know this. What is the fixation of domestic intelligence services around the world? It's not stopping the bad guys from doing the bad things. It is regime security, keeping the people who pay us in charge, keeping the people who we share our ideology with or our worldview or whatever, keeping them in charge. That is the primary, you could say, in some of the Western democracies, hopefully that's not true, but in most of the world, right?

• 36:21Speaker 06

  Every crappy country you and I have ever been to, and you've been to a lot more than I have, that is what, whatever the domestic intelligence service does, or the intelligence service overall does, that's what they're first and foremost concerned with. So the FBI takes it as an opportunity to get free and unfettered access to really police speech and thought, and that is what was going on here. I mean, they were looking at information, I mean, we're talking, take it out of the terrorism context for a second, this was, a lot of this was about COVID. Which COVID for me was a massive, I think COVID is the biggest wake-up call we've had

• 37:03Speaker 06

  in this country about how quickly this place can go authoritarian, and it's not like we're through the storm, I think it's almost like a dry run.

• 37:13Speaker 06

  And it's one of the biggest political awakenings I've had, honestly, you know, since the whole nine eleven era and everything that we saw and dealt with there. You think COVID was a dry run? I think it's a dry run in terms of the way what I call the apparatus was able to make people do things that were objectively worthless and even crazy because they said so. The foundation of a totalitarian society is the ability to make people say, affirm, and even believe lies. This has always been the case. The Soviets, actually, it's fascinating

• 37:58Speaker 06

  when you go back and look at some of this. Lenin wanted to create a new Soviet man, and that, of course, was going to be somebody who was just 100% devoted to the revolution, 100% devoted to whatever it is they wanted to say. And, you know, as we know, the Soviet Union became the evil empire and immiserated hundreds of millions of people around the world, and millions of people killed in purges and all the rest of what we know from history. Pavlov, training the dogs, conditioning. You go back to the origins of the Soviet system, and Lenin himself had a fascination with Ivan Pavlov. Why? Well, if he could condition the dogs in this way, why can't we condition the people

• 38:42Speaker 06

  in this way? If you can rewire the circuitry of animals to react to certain stimuli and do exactly what you want them to, can't you then have the same thing happen with human beings? And this Lenin said, Lenin was a big fan of Pavlov, even at a time, and it's complicated because, of course, Pavlov almost starved to death because the Soviets were starving everybody, because the system was a mess, but later on, they restaffed him up, gave him, he had hundreds of scientists, and there was this, there are still people who argue, we don't have the full records of it, that there was a much more clear Interest and even desire for experimentation on controlling people

• 39:26Speaker 06

  in a Pavlovian fashion, the way that they controlled the, or created the conditioning, selective conditioning in the dogs. And so, when you want to have a totalitarian society, you have to force people to believe things that are untrue. That's the, that's the baseline of everything, right? That's, this is why Solzhenitsyn's most important exhortation is "Live not by lies." Well, Sean, we're sitting here, and you and I both know, if I walked into any Fortune 500 company and sat down in the C-suite, and I was like, we all, we all can agree that like, only women can get pregnant, right? Not gonna fly. No. Can't say that. I'm a bad, I'm a bad person. I'm a bad person if I say that.

• 40:10Speaker 06

  I might get kicked off Twitter if I say that. And so, I think it's been a long project that we saw with, COVID, you had the union of mass media and mass hysteria. And the results were awful, horrific. We saw blatant violations of the Constitution. We saw the elevation of science that was lunacy, obviously. I mean, when you sat there and thought about things. And I, I get a little frustrated, because I think even a lot of people on the right, "Oh, I just don't want to," I'm like, they made your kids, depending on where you are, in New York,

• 40:55Speaker 06

  mask up between bites, outside, sitting on the ground in 30-degree weather. They were abusing children with the power of the state. And people want to forget about this? Who lost their job over that, Sean? Who's gone to jail? Who even lost their job and elected office over that? I mean, you have the lunatic governor of Michigan kept her job. The lunatic governor of California kept his job.

• 41:18Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, they like it. These people like it.

• 41:20Speaker 06

  Some of, that's exactly right. Some of them like to be ordered around.

• 41:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 41:25Speaker 06

  There's a deep need that a lot of people have, and some would even argue it's a basic human condition of the way, they fear choice, they fear freedom, they want order even at the expense of it being authoritarian, as in you just do this because. We had half the country go along with this, at least half the country go along with this.

• 41:46Shawn Ryan?

  Well, at the beginning, they had over that.

• 41:47Speaker 06

  Over that.

• 41:48Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it took a minute for people to realize what was going on.

• 41:52Speaker 06

  I mean, look, I, so I, I met-

• 41:54Shawn Ryan?

  It took me a minute to realize what was going on.

• 41:56Speaker 06

  I met, yeah, absolutely. I met with Donald Trump in the Oval Office in May of 2020 at, at his request. And, you know, I was in a media capacity. It was kind of funny because I was, I did a CIA, I did a couple of CIA deep dive briefings for Bush in the Oval Office. I went in there as like a CIA guy and I'm all, I went in for those briefings and it was all like, you know, yes, sir, like Commander in Chief, like I'm here, like I'm presenting, you know, you know, analysts were like, uh, we're all scared all the time. We're like, oh no, oh no, he's looking at me weird. But then I went in later and I walk in and Trump's like, Buck Sexton, best hair in television. Like, I was like, I can't believe I'm in the Oval Office for this, this is, you know. And we sat there and we

• 42:38Speaker 06

  talked, we talked about mostly some of the stuff in the intel community in terms of at the top level, you know, the concerns about the deep state. Some of what I'm talking about now, Trump was like, I want to hear, I want to hear what you think about this. So we talked about that a little bit. But then we got to the COVID stuff and I just looked at him and I said, sir, you know, this, so this is May of 2020 and I'm just like, he wasn't wearing a mask, by the way. I wasn't wearing a mask. We're walking in the White House, people are like, yeah, so people knew, right? It was already clear. If you're reading the data, if you're living in reality, you already knew. But I said, sir, you got to promise me, you know, no more lockdowns. And, and we shook hands also at that point. Remember, we were never going to shake hands again. People forget how crazy

• 43:20Speaker 06

  it got. I shook hands with Trump and, and he goes, he goes, oh no, we're not, we're not doing any, we're not doing any more lockdowns. Well, what happened unfortunately is-

• 43:31Speaker 06

  I mean, it's complicated because if you had a Democrat president instead of Donald Trump, I think we I think we would still be not in a full lockdown phase, but we would be COVID would have transformed America even more than it already did because it was the biggest opening for true authoritarian power grab that this country has seen, certainly in my lifetime. But he let it go to the states. Well, the problem is now you have all these blue states and all these blue cities and these and these even red states that are still acting like maniacs. And people weren't really protected from it. And this is why, look, I moved from New York to Florida. I'm a Florida resident now. I moved to Ron DeSantis'

• 44:13Speaker 06

  Florida because of people shouting at me, you know, as I was walking through the lobby where I live, put your mask on. I just want to look at them like, why are you insane? What do you what do you not get? Sitting down, taking your mask off when you eat, you're not but but wearing it when you go to some things like this is all virtue signaling. This is all garbage. And anyone who is willing to think through the situation themselves, I think, came to that conclusion. I didn't want to get too far afield from.

• 44:40Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, didn't it? Didn't it just come out a couple of weeks ago that the masks, now the science is is been released that the max had less than a 10% success rate of spreading COVID?

• 44:50Speaker 06

  So Fauci said that they work at the margins of 10% in the group setting. Fauci, it's actually funny, went to my high school. So he's like the most famous alumni of my high school.

• 45:04Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, wow.

• 45:04Speaker 06

  Yeah. I don't know. Maybe I'll get more money than he does in the in the celebrity lunch raffle or whatever they raffle us off this year because people have realized what a fraud he is. But so so the the deal on masking, masking was compliance training. Masking was never really about it was compliance training and it was a signaling mechanism. Be scared. We're in a pandemic. You're obeying. It was a constant reminder because otherwise people might have just started to be like, you know, I'm living my life and everything's pretty fine. And, you know, we're all going to go at some point anyway. I think conservatives in general.

• 45:43Speaker 06

  Have, I think the conservative mindset has more of a, an understanding and acceptance that we're all gonna die at some point. And so they're less likely to live with this sort of hysterical fear that pervades all their beliefs about everything, whether it's climate change or any number of things. But on the masking, so I used to sit with people, I would try to walk them through this. And I would say, I would say, so why do we mask on planes? Because I had people, I mean, I had people that knew me growing up in New York and they're reaching out on this. And why do we mask on planes? And they'd say, oh, because you're in really close proximity to other people. And you'd be like, yeah, but you realize that you're pulling your mask up and down to drink, you're

• 46:26Speaker 06

  pulling mask up and down to eat. You know, if I told you in the simplest terms to go out into the rain, but you're gonna wear a raincoat for half the time you're outside, you're wet. Like, what's the, what's the point? It makes no difference. And it's absurd. And if it worked, why hadn't people been doing this before? And, and I think unfortunately, we got into what, there's, what is it? Matthias Desmet wrote the book on it more recently. But the original is a French, a 19th century Frenchman Gustave Le Bon, who wrote The Crowd and Mass Formation, or Mass Formation Psychosis. And it's just people wanted to be herd animals.

• 47:08Speaker 06

  They wanted to be protected. And if you wore a mask, you were a part of the herd. And that was the baseline. So, you know, it goes back to Pavlov and all that, man. That's the baseline psychological conditioning that was underway.

• 47:21Speaker 06

  Man, let's, can I, can I, actually, can I, can I get fired up about just the Twitter files thing for one second with regard to Hunter Biden laptop? Okay.

• 47:31Speaker 06

  So, I mean, I sit here, and I know you've had a number of, of great patriots and former CIA guys sit here. The CIA brand, and I'd say the intelligence community brand, has been really unfairly

• 47:50Speaker 06

  Maligned and undermined by the actions of some partisans at the very top of that bureaucracy. I mentioned some of them were my, you know, chain of command at the top. So I'm slightly familiar with some of them. But they became unhinged because of Donald Trump. And that brings me to the Hunter Biden laptop. It's funny because they're supposed to be disinformation experts. And what they did was create disinformation. They knew that the laptop was probably real. Everyone knew the laptop was probably real. But they had a purpose. They had a mission, just like good little FSB officers would. Don't ask any questions.

• 48:35Speaker 06

  Don't worry that it's a lie. It's game time for this election. Joe Biden is a, you know, a clown who on his best days isn't. It's an insult to the notion of the presidency that this guy would be in charge of anything. Joe Biden might lose this election. It was very close. People sometimes I think forget that when you actually look at where it mattered with the states, not even getting into all the discussion about what was done where and the way things were rigged and all the rest of it. But they knew their job was to use the credibility that they had to have led people at these institutions, at these agencies, agencies where, as you know, people have given their lives for their country.

• 49:20Speaker 06

  They've given time with their kids. They've given marriages. They've given everything to try to serve the mission. And they decided to use the credibility from the very top level, not some little nobody from back in the day like me, somebody who was really senior in the process, the most senior people. They used the credibility of those agencies and what was sacrificed by people who did real work and put themselves on the line in order to propagate a lie to throw an election. That is third world banana republic bullshit.

• 49:56Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 49:57Speaker 06

  Everybody knows it. And, and I think that we had, we enter this scary time because when you have a regime that does not feel bound by, never mind traditions and conventions, but law that we're all supposed to agree on, which I do not think you have with the Democrat left. And I have criticisms of Republicans too, and we can get into some of that. But when you have a regime that does not feel bound by tradition and law, and you have an intelligence service or an intelligence apparatus that feels its primary mission is to the regime and not to the people and not to the constitution, really bad things can happen. And I do believe that is where we are.

• 50:39Shawn Ryan?

  I do too. I a hundred percent believe that. I mean,

• 50:46Shawn Ryan?

  do you think there's any turning back?

• 50:49Speaker 06

  Oh, God, I mean, I, I like to, I like to think that uh, there's always room for optimism and there's always hope that things can, can start to move in a, in a better direction. Um, here's, here's my, let me tell you my, I'll kind of war game out the concern. And then maybe you and I can both come to how this can get a lot better. Um, one of the biggest challenges we have is I think as we get, as things in this country become uh, more tyrannical, and I do believe that's the appropriate word. And you could say, oh, but what about Trump won? And then there's, and Republicans and this. The agenda and the change continues even when we win elections.

• 51:34Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 51:34Speaker 06

  This is what, because of the seizure, because of the control of so many of the choke points, platforms, um, levers of power within our society, politically and outside of the immediate realm of politics. The agenda continues and our notion of this as a country bound by the constitution, where the individual is the paramount, the individual is the highest realm of, of, of freedom, rights and the need to protect from the state. Um, that is dwindling, I think, very, very rapidly. And I think that if you look at it on a broader spectrum, instead of just thinking, oh, well, you know, today is fine.

• 52:19Speaker 06

  Yesterday was fine, maybe tomorrow will be great too. They've already indicted a president, a former president, who's a sitting, he is a likely next Republican candidate. They've indicted him on the most absurd grounds imaginable. If you gather together a bunch of law school students, you get in a protest, say, "Come up with the flimsiest felony prosecution of a politician or of a person you could." I think that this would win the prize, right? A payoff to a porn star that was supposed to be labeled as a campaign expense? It makes no sense. No one believes this makes any sense, but they did it.

• 53:04Speaker 06

  And I've been saying all along, "Well, why do they do it?" People ask this question, "Why do they do it?" And I say, "Well, because they are building. They're building to bigger things against Trump and against the movement." And I think you're going to see an indictment coming from Georgia in the summer. I think, given the incitement, well, the sedition, conspiracy to, you know, conspiracy to commit sedition, or whatever the official federal jargon may be, but they've got effectively sedition or treason charges on the books now against some of the January 6 guys.

• 53:45Speaker 06

  I think eventually they're going to hit Trump with a sedition charge, effectively calling him a traitor. And now for people who say they can't really want to do that because of what that would do to the country, right? I mean, now, how are we different from one of these hellholes where, you know, you and your brothers in arms would have to show up back in the day and like try to stop everybody from just murdering each other in the streets? Like, how different is our political system really over the long term from the political system in those places if we get to the point where the one party's guy, I mean, this is what happens in Russia, right? This is what happens in countries that we mock for how, you know, absurd their system is, you know?

• 54:28Speaker 06

  This is what you see in like one of the stands where they have elections, but it's 97% goes to the guy who happens to control the secret police. They bring a federal insurrection charge of some kind against Donald Trump.

• 54:44Speaker 06

  And they finally, they finally see through the promise that they've made to the Democrat base, starting all the way back in 2016 with Russia collusion. They have been conditioning, again, they have been conditioning their base and their people in this country to be open to the idea of a president who is a traitor. And to believe that we have a president who is a traitor. Now, to people that paid attention to Russia, the people who paid attention to the whole collusion narrative, they understand it's propaganda, it was lies, it was a deep state operation. Okay, fine. They don't care about those people because they don't think they have to.

• 55:29Speaker 06

  They think they'll have enough to just finally silence the opposition. And what do they really ultimately want? They want a one-party state. What do they have in California? And look, I love California. I'm not saying California is the Soviet Union, but what do they have? They have a one-party state. What do they think they can achieve in this country? I think they believe they can achieve, nominally, it's a democracy, sure, or a republic. But I think they believe they can achieve a de facto one-party state. And the way to do it is to just completely destroy the existing Republican Party by indicting and maybe even imprisoning Donald Trump. And they'll feel good about themselves as they do it because they've convinced themselves that Donald Trump is a traitor to his country, even though the Russia thing's a lie.

• 56:14Speaker 06

  They don't believe it's a lie.

• 56:16Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think they're gonna indict Biden or Biden's son? Because it's looking like in the media, they're gonna go after him.

• 56:23Speaker 06

  So, so this is a, this is a great question. Generally speaking, Democrats, as we know, live by an entirely different set of rules, right? When they matter to the party, people say, oh, what about, you know, some city councilman that was found with, you know, a paper bag with $200,000 in it or something, he went away? I'm like, yeah, because they don't care, because the guy doesn't matter, right? If you matter to the system, if you matter to what they're trying to achieve, Hillary Clinton's a perfect example of this. I mean, you know this. If I sit down with you, I'm your lawyer, and you tell me, hey, man, look, I just, I kind of wanted to rock out my own way when I was working with the government.

• 57:06Speaker 06

  And so I maybe have 100 TS documents just sitting on my server right now. I'd be like, we need to talk about a plea bargain to like, make sure you see your kids graduate from college. Like, it's, you know, it's bad news, right? This is, this is a bad situation. Hillary Clinton, they just made the whole thing go away. They just made it go away. They didn't even, no plea, no nothing, right? It just, it was sort of, so that's generally how it goes to the Hunter Biden question.

• 57:32Speaker 06

  I mean, the guy has, based on the fact pattern, we know, committed serious and multiple federal felonies. Never mind, I mean, the drug use thing, sure, but the stuff that really matters is, and also wouldn't be past the statute of limitations, would be the money laundering and tax evasion.

• 57:54Speaker 06

  I think the way this gets handled, and you know, I hate making predictions, especially, you know, on a show like this where a lot of people are gonna see it. I think the way this goes is he probably, they go through the motions to make it seem like he is subject to justice as well, but he gets absolute kid glove treatment. He will probably be made to plea, to take a plea agreement to something that will be, you know, suspended. He'll get, they'll suspend the sentence, it'll be like a prison sentence, but he'll suspend the sentence pending, you know, any other bad behavior. He'll pay some kind of a fine, and maybe he'll lose his law license. Maybe he'll be a convicted felon.

• 58:37Speaker 06

  But you have to remember, they've already got this all, they've already got this all squared away. Hunter Biden is Joe Biden's son, and the media narrative around this is Joe Biden has had a lot of personal and family tragedy in his life. Lost his wife in a car accident, lost his son to a brain tumor. So who could blame him for loving and supporting his only remaining child? This is what they're going to say. Now, there's obviously truth in this, and I do think that family bonds are sacred and some. But they'll say that to excuse the fact that they're then not going to look at, why was this guy getting paid millions of dollars by fronts for the Chinese Communist Party?

• 59:20Speaker 06

  Why was this guy getting paid, you know, whatever it was, $80,000 a month or $70,000 a month by a Ukrainian energy company for his expertise on something he knows nothing about? I mean, Hunter has expertise in freebasing. You're paying this guy for, you're Ukrainian. We all know why he's being paid. It couldn't be any more obvious, right? But again. Why is he being paid? Oh, my God, the, uh, the perception or reality of access to his father and his father's friends at the top of the Democrat hierarchy. By the way, it's brilliant. I mean, this is one, this is one area where conservatives, we, Republicans, whatever, we get our, we get our asses kicked. We get our asses kicked.

• 1:00:01Speaker 06

  The other side figures out where can we get maximum leverage and maximum power for our efforts and our money? And they just go, you know? We sit around, we're like, well, what would, what would John Adams do? Like, we have a very different approach to these things. Like, we don't, you know, what would Reagan say about this? We're not, we're not dialed in the same way, although I do think that started to change in recent years. So with Hunter Biden, I mean, you think about even just his, his dad. They don't even have to have explicit conversations about it, but it can just be, hey, Dad, you know, I'm doing. Remember, he's lied about knowing what his son did, as we know. So he's already on the record, he lied. So he knew more than he said. I'm sure he knew a lot more.

• 1:00:43Speaker 06

  But, you know, hey, Dad, I'm getting, you know, paid really nicely by this company in Ukraine. That's all it takes. Because then his dad, when he's talking to, as he did, I mean, this is not theoretical, interacting with the Ukrainian authorities who are looking at corruption, because it's a wildly corrupt country, as we know, it's, well.

• 1:01:05Speaker 06

  Focus on this, not that. Focus on this company, not that company. And Joe's standing there effectively writing the checks for the US government the whole time. It's brilliant. I mean, it's like, you know, the evil genius of our civilizational destruction, George Soros, nobody had ever thought to just put money into district attorney races in places where they don't live, where they maybe have spent no time, just because they realize that that is a weak seam in the system. There's no oversight. A prosecutor can effectively nullify whatever laws he or she wants and can turn a place into anarchy. And there's almost not, unless a governor is going to remove that person, or the mayor

• 1:01:49Speaker 06

  is going to fire them. And that doesn't happen in Democrat enclaves, so that's not really a worry. There's really no oversight of the decision-making process. And it's not a lot of money. I mean, you look at the tens of millions Soros put into these places, and if your idea is to create a fertile ground for at least an ideological revolution in America and the transformation of this country into something other than that, which it is, destroying law and order through radicalizing, through pushing for these radicalized prosecutors is, I mean, this is like, you know, low-tech, high-outcome stuff, or low-cost, high-outcome stuff. This is easy, easy to do.

• 1:02:33Shawn Ryan?

  Talking about the deep state and Soros, how do you think this is all, who's running this? How is this all intertwined?

• 1:02:42Speaker 06

  I talk about this as the apparatus, and friends of mine joke, they're like, is it kind of like The Matrix? I'm like, a little bit, except with, you know, communists instead of machines. You know, I think that there's one, there's a belief in this country. That we have, with the fall of the of the wall and the collapse of the Soviets, that we have defeated collectivism, right? They're done, finished, put aside Communist China, which is really a hybrid model. It's not, it's not, you know, Communist in the purely Marxist sense. It's obviously operating on market economy, but there's some other... Anyway, that's that's another part of the conversation, like what's going on in this country?

• 1:03:27Speaker 06

  There's been a collectivist infiltration ideologically of the most powerful institutions in America, even outside of elected office. And and that has been a long, a decades-long process where there are people who are true believers, who push this stuff, who push collectivism, who push different... You know, we're having conversations all the time about, well, is it cultural Marxism we should call it, or woke-ism, or what is... Where did this thing come from? And the reality is, it's always been there. It's just gotten more powerful and it's taken different pathways than it has historically in other places. I mean, you know, McCarthy, I mean, here's a perfect example of this, right?

• 1:04:11Speaker 06

  People throw on this term, they say, "That's McCarthyism." It's like, "Oh, my gosh." It's like, "Not as bad as like racism, but McCarthyism is another bad-ism, right?" McCarthy was mostly right. What he was saying was overwhelmingly true. It was certainly true about the high-level penetrations of the United States government by not just communist sympathizers, by the by the KGB. This is very real. And we know this, we know this because of the top-secret military project, the Venona, Project Venona. So there were communist infiltrations of the United States government at senior levels. There were a lot of them. Whittaker Chambers wrote his book, Witness.

• 1:04:54Speaker 06

  I bring this book up to conservatives all the time, like, "You guys have read Witness, right? Oh, oh, Witness, you know, it's how..." He was a communist in America, helping the Soviets, and realized what evil this was, and turned around and then devoted his life to defeating this menace. And people are, this is, this is sort of, this part of our history has all been forgotten, the fight against the totalitarian collectivism of the 20th century that resulted in, you know, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of deaths over the course of the 20th century, depending on how you want to calculate it.

• 1:05:36Speaker 06

  And you look at this and you say, do we really think this is just all gone? It just, it just, ah, it's just sort of in the ether now. No, it's still very much there and it goes to, I mean, I don't want to get theological about it, but I do think at some level it goes to the existence of evil. And in, you know, modern, modern human, human-based societies, that's always something that we lose sight of, but it's very real. I think that if you're trying to undermine, transform, and either, you know, oftentimes is, do they want to destroy or do they want to, do they want to transform? It's always both, right? Those things go hand in hand.

• 1:06:21Speaker 06

  You have to destroy first, destroy first before you can effectively transform. And I do think that there's that process underway in our society. So, you know, I call it the apparatus because I think it's a helpful term and it hearkens back to the Soviet era when they had, you know, apparatchiks. We have these terms. Why is it so possible that the second most powerful country in the world in the 20th century, or, you know, let's say from 19, you know, 1945 on, they fell into this despotism and tyranny and, and this darkness for decades, but that couldn't happen here? I ask people this question. I say, why do you think this couldn't happen here? What is it about this place? Oh, we're America.

• 1:07:05Speaker 06

  I'm like, okay, yeah, I love this place, right? We can talk about how much we love it. You don't see the handwriting on the wall for where all of this is going. And we have people now who are being at least economically pressured and certainly psychologically conditioned to say things that are lies, that we all know are untrue. These are falsehoods, and you are to live your life by these falsehoods. You know, if you're, and by the way, the gender thing, they, they, I see all their games. I know how they do their propaganda. I understand how their brainwashing and information warfare systems work.

• 1:07:48Speaker 06

  One of the things they love to do is to push as hard as they can in an area until they meet resistance. And then you know what they say? What are you talking about? We're not doing that. We don't really want, you know, we don't really want your kids to be changing in a locker room with people who are, you know, of the other gender, you know? We don't want, you know, if somebody out there has a 14-year-old daughter, we don't want her changing in a locker room next to a, you know, 30-year-old guy who actually says he's a woman as of a year. We don't want that. They absolutely do want that, and they keep doing it over and over again. But the moment everyone goes, hold on, hold on a second, this is, we've got a problem here. They go, oh, we don't, you know, this is, why? And then they do, why are you so focused on this? Are you, are you a bigot? Something wrong with you?

• 1:08:33Speaker 06

  You a bad person? Turn it around right away. Classic, classic mind control tactics, classic techniques of, of brainwashing. And brainwashing, you know, comes from communism, by the way. I mean, the whole term of, uh, brainwash is a term taken from Mandarin Chinese for wash brain, which is what they, which is what was said to have been done to prisoners of the communist regime. Cause some of them came out and they're like, you know, they were changed, right? They were fundamentally changed through the isolation, torture, stress techniques, struggle sessions, all of that, which we could talk more about. So, but they tell you that these things aren't happening and they actually are happening. And everyone needs to understand that, and it's very real.

• 1:09:18Shawn Ryan?

  That's, that's kind of, I've, nobody seems to know where the head of the snake is on this. Where is it coming from?

• 1:09:28Speaker 00

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  On October 2nd.

• 1:09:33Speaker 00

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  Tom Cruise is.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out.

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:09:45Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:09:52Speaker 03

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not permitted without parent.

• 1:10:01Speaker 06

  Comes from within all of us, unfortunately. It's the existence of evil in humanity and of, you know, the devil is the father of lies. And I'm not somebody who talks about church or faith or anything really very much publicly. But there is, we are in a phase, we're entering a phase here in this country where I think, um, I think that evil is getting its way much more than any of us would have anticipated even 20 or 30 years ago. I think that if you're asking from a systematic, which I know is what you are, but I just, I do think there's a broader philosophical point here. I mean. I do too. I'm, I've, I've come to that conclusion as well because.

• 1:10:46Speaker 06

  Oh, really? Nothing makes sense. Yeah. Nothing makes any sense. Sean, if I, if I told you that we would be able to easily now do a quick Google search and find political leaders and activists across the country on the left who would say, if you want to abort a baby in the ninth month, you know, the week that it is due, there is nothing wrong with that. And in fact, it's a celebration of freedom. If I had told you that 20 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago, but 20 years ago, you would have said, that's, come on.

• 1:11:31Speaker 06

  You know, safe, legal and rare. My body, my choice. Like, you know, people, I'm not saying, you know what I mean? Like this, this would, this would have been the, you know, this would have been the opposition to it, right? Oh, no, no, no, that's not true. It is 100% now, dogma, doctrine, speaking about what's true and not true.

• 1:11:48Speaker 06

  Nine months, you're a dad. Nine months, it's a baby, right? We all know it's a baby. We can talk about some of the other political realities of what should be the law in different states and everything else. But they openly say it's not a baby and in fact, we should celebrate the termination of this life as an act of freedom. Janet Yellen, the Treasury Secretary, I didn't think this was a minor thing. She says, you know, "One thing we could do to help the economy," and I'm paraphrasing, but you know, "more abortions."

• 1:12:15Speaker 06

  What? First of all, it's not even, it's not even true, it's not even accurate. Put aside the humanity of it. We actually need, and this is one of the things I love. I mean Elon Musk is a genius, I think, I think that's fair to say. I don't throw that term around a lot. Mozart is a genius, and there are some people, you know, Einstein is a genius. I think Elon Musk is a genius.

• 1:12:32Speaker 06

  But he's so right on that, we don't have enough, we're not, you know, we don't have enough people. We're not making enough people right now in a lot of parts of the world, and a lot of, and really actually overall globally you make the case, we're just not having enough children. And one of my regrets is I wish I'd actually started, I mean, I'm married now and we're hoping to start a family very soon, but I wish I'd started a family and I had met the right person, I wish I started a family even sooner.

• 1:12:56Speaker 06

  But, you know, there was all this propaganda, all of this, "Oh, you know, you have to get all these things set." What? So that I, you know, so I can make VP somewhere or something? I mean, all the thinking of this, I think, is skewed. Anyway, I don't want to, I'm sorry to divert, because your question is core, it's key, the apparatus, where is the top of it? And it's something that I struggle with all the time.

• 1:13:13Shawn Ryan?

  It's, I mean, it's just so well organized. Everything falls into, looking at it from the outside, everything seems to fall into place just perfectly. Everybody's in on this.

• 1:13:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:13:23Shawn Ryan?

  There's this, you know, and you keep referring to the left, but there's also people on the right that are part of this. I mean Mitch McConnell, you know, we know he's taken-

• 1:13:30Speaker 06

  Oh, the machinery, for sure.

• 1:13:31Shawn Ryan?

  It's all, it's all intertwined.

• 1:13:34Speaker 06

  So here, I'll, I'll-

• 1:13:35Shawn Ryan?

  And so it's so well organized, that's, that's what I can't wrap my head around, is nobody seems to be able to to find what, where's the source of this? Where is it starting from? And how is it so well organized in infiltrating literally everything?

• 1:13:52Speaker 06

  You know, I think,

• 1:13:56Speaker 06

  I think that there are a few things. I want to deal with the Republican part of it first. The Republicans who are a part of the machinery of the elites right now.

• 1:14:08Speaker 06

  I know why they're doing it. They're doing it because they're cowards. They're doing it because it's in their interest. They're doing it because they don't want the heat and the death threats and they don't want their, you know, their wife to have someone throw Chardonnay at her at the country club, right? I get it. I know why. Now, this isn't to excuse it, but this is to say, they're just, they're just succumbing to the pressure and the incentives. Pressure and incentives. So people who are, who are roughly speaking ideologically on the right, who are people, you know, they use the term controlled opposition or anything along those lines, right? It's the incentive structure.

• 1:14:49Speaker 06

  They want to be, they want that one editorial in the New York Times about the newfound respect, you know? Oh, this person, they were, you know, the pat on the head. I always call it the pat on the head. And it's sad. I've actually seen, you know, I have a rule and I, I think it's a good rule. I will, I do not trash anyone who is my friend by name in the media. Like, I don't care what they do or say, I just, I won't, you know, I won't agree with them, I won't lie about them, I won't trash them. But I, I know people who have gone over, who have become these, like the Republicans who only want us to all be Mitch McConnell and only have nice things to say about the Democrats, right? And it's sad. I've seen it, it's sad. But they're just, they need that next contract, they've got a mortgage, they've got bills

• 1:15:31Speaker 06

  to pay and they're, you know, their sense of purpose and the importance of their beliefs is secondary. So now we get to the left. There's obviously that too, right? That's another component of it. So you think it's the pressure? On the right, for, on, on the right, I think that the people that go along with the system are overwhelmingly just hoping to keep their perks and privileges and, and just, they just like the way things are as they are. Is it growing or is it shrinking? I think that there's been, the best part about the Trump era has been the awakening on the right of the need to think of this as a fight.

• 1:16:14Speaker 06

  I remember, you know, Republican politics specifically, going back to when I was like, this is surprising, nobody's probably watching me on your show. I was a, you know, college Republican, I was like director of recruiting, I thought Reagan was awesome. But we always had this sense that the highest good is like compromise and triangulation and finding a way that works but still somewhat respects the Constitution, right? That was kind of the... And now we realize, these commies want your eight-year-old to destroy his or her agenda while you're pretending that white nationalism is the biggest terrorist threat in the country

• 1:16:59Speaker 06

  and climate change is gonna end the world in 10 years. And, you know, you just go down this list and you're like, I can't... I'm not sitting here having some negotiation over these issues with normal people. There's a radicalization. And notice, when I say this, the baseline feeling of people on the right is, maybe, is that a little too much? There's a little too much talk radio going on there. Notice how they say that, you know, we are monsters, constantly. We are monsters. I sit here and I advocate on my radio show every day for people to live in freedom and security and decency, and I advocate for people to be respectful and kind to each other, advocate

• 1:17:43Speaker 06

  for responsibility, you know? I mean, I hate... Power corrupts, I get that, but, you know, if you made me, if you made me the king of Florida, which I guess right now is Ron DeSantis, people would have clean streets, good schools, safe everything, and yet the left thinks that I'm a monster.

• 1:18:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:01Speaker 06

  How is that possible? Both of these things cannot be true, right? Someone has radicalized, is my point. And I don't think it's us.

• 1:18:08Shawn Ryan?

  I don't either. But do you think this is shrinking or is it growing? I think...

• 1:18:21Shawn Ryan?

  Everything is such a fit. I think these people are ripping the wiring out of the walls because they know what's coming.

• 1:18:29Speaker 06

  You know what's coming? Take me further on that. Meaning that you think that they think the ultimate victory is in sight? Or they think the backlash is coming?

• 1:18:35Shawn Ryan?

  I think we're collapsing. I mean, these banks are failing. Talking about the debt ceiling, the, the, I mean, everywhere you look in this country, from my standpoint, with my morals, my values, the way I was raised, everything is falling apart. Nothing makes sense. What's up is down. The, the, the, the sexualization of kids. The, you know, Vanderbilt University, you know, right down the street from here was operating on kids. I mean, I think what was it, as young as eight years old? Eight years old.

• 1:19:11Shawn Ryan?

  Cut it off. Rip the ovaries out. You know, I mean.

• 1:19:17Speaker 06

  Monstrous, by the way. I mean, that's truly monstrous.

• 1:19:19Shawn Ryan?

  Everywhere you look, the, the, the racism stuff is, you know, the BLM, Antifa, just Ukraine, how China's infiltrating this country in, in so many different, so many different aspects. You know, all around. I mean, the supply chain, COVID, buying off our politicians, the fentanyl crisis, buying our farmland, settling Africa. I mean, they're there to take the lithium mines in Afghanistan. They're, they're going to supply us with our solar power. I mean, they, they just have so many different angles on us. You know, and, and I, you, you add all of this stuff up together. And it's.

• 1:20:03Speaker 06

  So.

• 1:20:04Shawn Ryan?

  The out, the outcome isn't going to be great.

• 1:20:07Speaker 06

  So.

• 1:20:07Shawn Ryan?

  And so it makes me wonder if these politicians know this is happening, that maybe a complete collapse is coming. And they're just, they're ripping the wiring out of the walls.

• 1:20:16Speaker 06

  So I have an additional pessimistic thought. And then I have an optimistic thought to not necessarily balance it out, but I'd come in it both ways. The history of fiat currency, for anybody who is interested, is both very instructive and very depressing. Because the history of fiat currency, over a long enough timeline, is the history of inflation, corruption, and collapse. Find me a place, right? And there's people can even see in history, you see the ancient Roman coins, for example, right? And they start out and there is a certain silver purity, right? There's a certain purity of these. There's silver coins, there's value in these.

• 1:21:00Speaker 06

  I think this is the denarius, but I might, you know. You've got a lot of history folks who are watching are gonna be like, "No, it's not that." But, and then over time, over a series of, call it a couple of centuries, the coinage of the Roman Empire just started to become crap. It went from, you know, 97% silver to, you know, 70% silver, and it keeps going down. And this is because they were trying to inflate away their debts. The destruction of the Venezuelan economy is such an important lesson, and it's not something that people pay enough attention to in this country now. It hits a little bit closer to home for me,

• 1:21:44Speaker 06

  just because I live in South Florida, and I spend a lot of time with Venezuelans, Venezuelan refugees, effectively, from that state. People don't even realize, basically, the entire top of the Venezuelan government are sanctioned narco traffickers by the Treasury Department in this country. And just start with that. They're, you know, they're, so they don't care. I mean, the economy falls apart, there's basically breadlines, there's the Maduro diet, all that, they don't care. They're billionaires. They're billionaires from looting their own treasury, but also because they have their hands in the narco trafficking pile, too. Let me think about that for a second, right? How are you gonna negotiate with these guys? How are you gonna operate with them?

• 1:22:27Speaker 06

  Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world, larger than Saudi Arabia. Now Venezuelan crude is heavier and takes more refinement, so you know, people argue about whether it's like the best oil, but, or you know, the most efficient, but it does have the largest proven oil reserves in the world. How do you take a country with a rich and sophisticated culture and the equivalent of a giant ATM machine underground and destroy it so it is an anarchic hellhole of murder, looting, theft, rape, all of it? Just run an economy based on social justice. Just run an economy based on collectivism. Put people in charge who promise that the rich are the problem and they'll take care

• 1:23:11Speaker 06

  of everything as long as you empower them to do whatever is necessary to balance everything out. And just give them that, just give them that. Now, who does that sound like? In this country, who does that sound like? The destruction of the Venezuelan economy, I think, is a story that every American should know and understand because the, you know, AOC wing of the party, which now is the vanguard, people, it's not the fringe, I think that's an important distinction, right? You're a military guy. They are the, the tip of the spear. The left and the Democrat Party are the ones, look at Joe Biden. Joe Biden, old grandpa Joe, we're supposed to think that he's a guy that we can trust. Joe's been in politics a long time.

• 1:23:54Speaker 06

  Joe's a guy, you know, you know, Joe, he's like, uh, like a union guy, you know? He's old school. Yeah, he's Democrat for the working folks. It is all bullshit. The Biden White House is putting forward executive orders, guidance, you name it, about transgender surgery for the kids. All in favor of it, by the way.

• 1:24:18Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:24:19Speaker 06

  That's the Biden White House, everybody. So just to, to, to completely dissolve this notion, they're like, Joe Biden's a moderate. Joe Biden is a Trojan horse. He is a, a false front for a party that if it could get away with going, they don't have the power yet, and I know that. There are Republican governors who are doing a good job. There is a Republican Party that still exists for something. There is Donald Trump, there is Ron DeSantis, there are these individuals who are trying to hold back the dam and fight in the ways that they can. But if the Democrat Party could go...

• 1:24:54Speaker 06

  All in on the direction of Maduro, they would absolutely do it. Because I do believe the the brainwashing has gotten to that level of the base. The affirmation of lies is so consistent and so widespread. And so the history of fiat currency is one of eventual collapse historically, just because of inflation and the whims of government. And you look at even a country not far from us, how rapidly. It was the second wealthiest country in the Western Hemisphere. People forget this. Second wealthiest country in the Western Hemisphere in like the year 2000, let's say, something like that. And now it's just complete mess, collapse. Didn't take very long. I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, per capita, wealthiest per capita.

• 1:25:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, for a period of time. It was, it was doing well. Maybe it was the third. I don't know if someone's going to fact check me on this one. But then on the, but on the, on the positive side, I would say as much as, you know, the 1619 project likes to malign the American founding and there's such an effort to undermine, whether it's the founding fathers personally or the philosophy. This place that we have, that we have been given, this country, America, is, is truly the work of geniuses built on principles that have been true, not just for our history, but for all of human history. And that makes it durable. Doesn't mean it's invincible, but it is durable.

• 1:26:23Speaker 06

  The system that we have is built with redundancies. The system that we have is built with checks and balances that are meant to keep us from going off the cliff into the abyss. You know, and it, obviously, we've had times where it didn't work the way that we had hoped it would, but we have managed to come back to where we are with at least being the single greatest and best hope of mankind. So I think that the hope and promise of America is the thing that keeps us all going, even as it seems like the winds are being racked up by the other side, which I do believe is a fair, I mean, I, Trump came in.

• 1:27:05Speaker 06

  A once in a generation, maybe once in a lifetime, political phenomenon. And change the conversation, I think, in really important ways. But I say this to people and they get mad at me. And I say this with love, love for the country and love for the people that, like me, voted for Trump twice, voted for the movement, believe it. I'm like, you have to be honest with yourselves. What has changed in our favor that is durable? Now, they will say, and this is true, the Supreme Court, right? That's a change that endures and that's been phenomenal. And the overturning of Roe v. Wade. And Donald Trump was the best, most effective pro-life president that we've ever had,

• 1:27:50Speaker 06

  which is a remarkable, you know, remarkable statement to be able to make. And I think it's a true one. But they're hoping to pack the Supreme Court the next time around, guys. That's kind of what I mean. It's not about Trump. It's about their understanding of the system, the outer limits of how they operate. You know, people say, what about the four years of Trump? I sit here, I say, did we solve the border? Did we solve the border crisis? He, he held it back, right? He, he tamped it down and started, started to get under control. We've had six million people come into the country in less than three years. Yeah. Right? So we have to be honest with ourselves about, about what's happening. Where are the wins, where are the losses? Where's the transformation occurring?

• 1:28:31Speaker 06

  And where, now, on the, on the positive side, parents, understanding what's going on. One of the, there are a few really good things that happened from COVID, right? A few things that I think, mostly it was very depressing and frightening for humanity and America specifically, because people are such sheep. You know, lemmings don't really commit suicide, right? That's all a falsehood. People always say this all the time. So if nothing else, people learn that from me. Think about, everyone believes, they're like, why do lemmings commit suicide? They don't. It comes from some documentary. The whole thing is an urban legend, but anyway. People were like lemmings in the popular conception though, right? But anyway, so the, the.

• 1:29:18Speaker 06

  The only good thing about COVID was because of the Zoom stuff at home. You know, your kids aren't at the age yet where this was, you know, really a thing, or your child, I should say. But because of the Zoom lessons, I had so many people, because I was doing, I was doing five hours a day during COVID on radio. Like, I was just like, you guys have, you guys have space on that station, like, boom, like, I just wanted it to be, because I needed my audience. Because they were my sanity, because they were, if you're listening to me, you understand what I'm telling you is, this is crazy what's going on here, folks. Having to stand six feet apart in line outside to get into a grocery store, that's gonna save your life? But you can jump on a plane. But you can jump on a plane. But, but if you want a BLM riot, if you want a BLM riot, you go wild, you do what you want to do.

• 1:30:02Speaker 06

  Mask, no mask, mass gathering, who cares? It was tyranny, plain and simple. But, and we saw it, and the medical, by the way, I talked about the intelligence professionals, how the intelligence community has just been wildly undermined now for, in a way that I, I think it's gonna take a very long time to repair, if they ever even try. Medical profession, oh, so many doctors are cowards, so many doctors are cowards. Not all of them, some of them reaching out to me, supporting me. I had, I had a world-class epidemiologist who I still, is always off the, you know, is always without attribution, who was talking to me about what was going on and what's real and what's not, you know, people were willing to talk to me, just to like, I need someone to know the truth.

• 1:30:45Speaker 06

  But I don't want, and then you say, well, well, why are they worried about their own crew, whatever, they say, well, I'm treating patients, man. If I lose my license, some of them, they rely on me, like, I, I have an obligation to them. So some of them were in a really tough spot, I get that. But the doctors who were doing the TikTok dances and, you know, mask up, double mask, appalling communists, appalling. But I, I just, on the, on the parental involvement thing,

• 1:31:13Speaker 06

  people saw what their kids were being taught. They saw the reality of the, and these are, and many on the right say this, and they're so correct, and it's so important, the pipelines for the madness that we see with these, you know, state capital takeovers of shrieking lunatics and, you know, the BLM marches and the Antifa maniacs, and all the pipelines to that in this country are the school systems and the university. And I do think that parents have recognized now, I know they have because they call me, they tell me, I mean, you know, we're taking calls every day on the show,

• 1:31:54Speaker 06

  that if you let your kids get brainwashed with this nonsense, it's not gonna matter. It's not gonna matter. You can be there, you can be a great parent, but if they're being told this stuff, and they, because what, because what the schools do is they train them to think their parents are the problem. You know, they, they train them so that when some kid comes home from school, says, you know, mommy, daddy, like, why, you know, why do you tell me that like, so and so in my class isn't a pansexual? They use this terminology, by the way, for kids. I, I'm uncomfortable even telling you here on the show, I'm uncomfortable even having a conversation because it is so evil and obtuse and crazy, but go to the

• 1:32:39Speaker 06

  head of content at Disney, head of content at Disney, on a company call, this is on video, anyone can check it, says she has a, she has a non-binary child and a pansexual child. I'm, I'm not, what is pansexual? I don't even know, I had to Google it. What is it? It's like, you're all sexualities. You're, you're, you're heterosexual, you're, you're, it's like, it's like, it's like, it just means all, all sexual, so I, Sean, you're asking me a question for which there's no real answer because it's a fad. It has no meaning. What is it called? Pansexual. Pansexual. It means you're, you're straight, you're, you're, uh, you know, you're, you're gender

• 1:33:22Speaker 06

  queer, you're bi, you're, you're like everything. All of it. All of it. It's effectively the personification of LGBTQIA plus. How many people at home can even tell me what LGBTQIA plus stands for? That is the full acronym. And what is the plus? Now, they're, they're going to teach- I know what the plus is.

• 1:33:45Shawn Ryan?

  It's gonna be pedophilia.

• 1:33:47Speaker 06

  Oh my god.

• 1:33:48Shawn Ryan?

  Isn't that what it is?

• 1:33:52Shawn Ryan?

  That's, they're now making pedophilia sexual gender. Or a sexual identity, excuse me.

• 1:33:59Speaker 06

  Oh my god.

• 1:34:02Shawn Ryan?

  Have you not heard about this?

• 1:34:03Speaker 06

  No, no, I've, I've, I've heard about this.

• 1:34:08Speaker 06

  You know, there's a, uh, there's an acronym that they will occasionally, it'll pop up in places. Articles, news articles and things, you've probably seen it. They call it a minor attracted person.

• 1:34:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yes, that's the PC term.

• 1:34:23Speaker 06

  That's the PC.

• 1:34:24Shawn Ryan?

  I just heard about this from somebody in California.

• 1:34:26Speaker 06

  M A P.

• 1:34:27Shawn Ryan?

  Minor attracted person.

• 1:34:29Speaker 06

  Now. See, I, I always try. To never.

• 1:34:37Speaker 06

  I never want to exaggerate. The evil that they're doing because I want everyone to really, I need to say things that I always believe are true to my audience and for myself. Like, I have to try to live in the truth. Given what I do and given what I think my, my mission in life is, right? Like what I'm trying to accomplish.

• 1:34:57Speaker 06

  I wanna believe. This is my honest assessment, I wanna believe. That that is not the next step. Just because it is so evil. But I couldn't argue with somebody that it logically does not seem to be. The next step, do you know what I mean? I, I, I, I would hope that that's not where the left is taking it. But if somebody were to push me on this and say, do you think that's where this is going? I would have to say, yes.

• 1:35:28Shawn Ryan?

  That's where I think it's going.

• 1:35:30Speaker 06

  I, I, I'm, and it's. You know, you sit here and you say. Look, the, the whole.

• 1:35:37Shawn Ryan?

  There's already a push towards it.

• 1:35:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's, it's already appearing, but the whole.

• 1:35:41Shawn Ryan?

  You can't even talk about it. On this platform because it'll get censored, I just did one, it's already censored.

• 1:35:47Speaker 06

  Really?

• 1:35:47Shawn Ryan?

  Did the preview, preview was censored. Did shorts, little reels, you know, the short social media reels, censored. I didn't even monetize the, the, the.

• 1:35:58Speaker 06

  So, you know.

• 1:35:58Shawn Ryan?

  Interview because. I'm trying to avoid it because it's important that that kinda information gets out. But there's already a push, there's a push in California towards it. Newsom did this bill in 2020.

• 1:36:11Shawn Ryan?

  Do you know about this?

• 1:36:12Speaker 06

  No, what's the bill?

• 1:36:13Shawn Ryan?

  The, I'm gonna butcher this, but the judges, it's in the judges' hands whether they want to, they want to put these people on the sex offenders list. If it's 14 years of age or older, and as long as sex, oral sex, any kind of sex is consensual, it's up to the judge, whether that's a crime or not.

• 1:36:36Shawn Ryan?

  Now, this is also spreading. It's either Minnesota or Wisconsin. I can't remember which one. It's already spread. There's 17 different Democrats voted for that. Yeah, it's, it is the next push.

• 1:36:49Speaker 06

  You know...

• 1:36:51Shawn Ryan?

  That's, that's gonna be the next Bud Light commercial.

• 1:36:53Speaker 06

  Here's what, I mean, my god. Again, I, I just...

• 1:36:56Shawn Ryan?

  And you'll be forced, you'll be forced, just like right now. You know, with, with the, with the stuff that we don't agree with, you'll be forced to...

• 1:37:06Shawn Ryan?

  You'll be a bigot if you're not...

• 1:37:07Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, I, I can, if they're gonna roll it out, I can tell you how they're gonna roll it out, because this is how they roll out everything. It'll start with, it'll start with tolerance. Meaning, we need to just tolerate these people. We're not gonna tolerate their behavior. We're not gonna say it's okay, the behavior's okay, but we need to just let them talk about this more. We need them to socialize these ideas more. We need them to describe what it is to be a minor attracted person. We need to take them out of the shadows, Sean, so that they can get the, you know, more of the help and it really, right? You see, that's how it always, that's how it always goes. Because people are gonna say, well, that's, it's just evil, guys. You're just talking about evil, right? Like, i- if there is a group of people that are, that are like, you know, I just like to sadistically abuse, uh, dogs.

• 1:37:52Speaker 06

  We don't need to bring those people out of the shadows and have a conversation about it. We need to eradicate that, right? But you're not, but the, the way they'll roll it out is, i- if they're gonna roll it out, which, again, I mean, I, I hope they won't, because, you know, then you start to feel like, what am I even, what is this country even, you know, what am I defending if this is something that's even being talked about in a way that, you know, has to be considered as the, as the direction we're going in as a country or something. But, uh, one of the big vulnerabilities of, of, uh, conservatives, of the right in this country, is... We are polite. And I know that sounds, but you know, we are, we, we, we come from a, we like to be respectful

• 1:38:37Speaker 06

  to people. And the left uses this. They use this, I'll give you an example. Just use the preferred pronouns. Why is it such a big deal to you? It'll make this person feel better. They've had a really tough life. They have this difficult process. And you hear these words, right? You hear these words as a good, as a person, as a man of honor, as a decent human being. You hear when someone is, you know, oh, man, you hear about the struggles and you go, you know, I, I don't want to make someone's life harder, right? I want everyone to be happy. I want everyone to be safe. I want everyone to, you know, reach their best version of self, find a life of purpose, find a life of service, have a family, all those things. What happens though is you say, all right, I'm, I'm gonna use the pronouns.

• 1:39:22Speaker 06

  Fast forward a little bit. That six foot four guy with a penis who's swimming against those women in the NCAA finals is not a man. And if you say it's a man, you're a bad person. That is how they get you. That is how it happens. That is how it unrolls in front of your eyes. And so, you see what I mean about how if they're gonna do it? It's the frog in the boiling pot. It's the temperature going slowly. They're, they're gonna come out with it and say, I mean, here, man, if I sat here and I said to you, and let's go back, let's go back to when, when you were with the teams, right? If someone sat down and they're like, hey, man, like, you hear Bud Light is gonna roll out a transgender influencer campaign where some guy who doesn't act like a woman, by the way, that's not true.

• 1:40:07Speaker 06

  He doesn't act like a woman. Shaun, it's an adult male who acts like a 13 or 14 year old girl. A caricature of a 13 or 14 year old girl. No woman acts like this, you know, dancing around and doing all the things that, you know, this is, and these little bizarre outfits, the whole thing, it's bizarre. It's mental illness. The whole thing is crazy. But if I said to you Bud Light is gonna run a campaign. By the way, you know Bud Light's run by an agency guy. Is it?

• 1:40:36Speaker 06

  Former, of course. Written up in the Daily Mail.

• 1:40:39Shawn Ryan?

  Former?

• 1:40:42Speaker 06

  Well, you know, um, yeah, I don't know. I don't know if he's gonna watch this or whatever, but you know, he should reach out to me. I know, I know who he should talk to, to try to, you know, handle these things. You know, and out of respect for our former employer, I'd be willing to, uh, you know, to talk him through some of this stuff. If you, if someone sat down with you, you and the teams instead, that some guy who's pretending to be a 14 year old girl is gonna be the face of a Bud Light ad, you'd be like, get, get the hell out of here. It just happened.

• 1:41:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:09Speaker 06

  So if this is where we are, how can I, and now I know people say there's the pushback and everything. Okay, yeah. Why should there need to be pushback? I mean, why should this even be a thing we have to think about, right? How could it, how could it get so crazy that we even have to be mobilizing to stop this level of crazy?

• 1:41:28Shawn Ryan?

  Well, speaking of the Navy.

• 1:41:29Speaker 06

  Oh, God.

• 1:41:30Shawn Ryan?

  And their, and their advertising.

• 1:41:32Speaker 06

  Oh, God, we're gonna get in trouble.

• 1:41:36Shawn Ryan?

  The, uh, the new drag recruiting agenda that they're, I didn't wa, I don't watch this stuff. I just can't.

• 1:41:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a, it's a drag queen doing recruiting for the Navy. You're a Navy, but see, I always, I'll make fun of the CIA all day 'cause you know what I mean? It's inside the family. You're of the teams, man. Like, what do you, when you see that, what, I'm curious. I know it's, you know, I don't wanna be asking you the questions, but, uh, what do you think? I just see that. I think this is, this is everything that my friends who were door kickers, who I looked up to as a, as a little CIA guy who was just trying to do my whatever little part of things that I could. I mean, dude, I, I always thought, I thought the, man, I don't know if anyone tells you this, and we can get into some of the CIA stuff too. Like, I just thought all the GRS guys were awesome. Like, I thought these guys were badasses and like, I like, to me, that was, like,

• 1:42:25Speaker 06

  the, the real mission was what they, you know, what the JSOC guys were doing and everything else. And I just felt like, you know, if I'm like the equipment manager on this football team, like, awesome, you know, whatever I can do. But then I see this thing with the Navy and all those guys that I knew, and some of them I still talk to and, you know, are friends with, whatever. I'm like, the stuff they say is really true. Like, this place has lost its mind. We are, the military is our last fortress. It is our, it is our last domain, I think, for a lot of us who harken to a traditional America rooted in sanity and the Constitution and God. And when we see stuff like that happen, we're like, is this really happening to you guys too?

• 1:43:04Shawn Ryan?

  Oh yeah, it's happening everywhere.

• 1:43:08Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I don't even, I don't even, I don't even recognize any of the places of government I used to work. I don't recognize the SEAL teams, I don't recognize the Navy, I don't recognize the agency, I don't, I don't. They're, they're not the same.

• 1:43:23Speaker 06

  Can we, I mean, I want to get into this a little bit because people ask me, they say, given the beliefs you have, why, you know, and I, I've even been by people who don't know me, like they'll hit me, like, oh, like he's ex-CIA's, you can't trust him or something. I'm like, guys, I was a kid growing up in New York. 9/11 happens and I just feel like I want to help. Like this is my country, I love my city, I love my country. I had no, no one in my family, military, no nothing in terms of, you know, guidance on that. You know, it's not like I had an uncle who was, you know, an SF Colonel and he could kind of talk me through it. And I just, I was, um, you know, I was studying Arabic before 9/11 in school just because I thought it was interesting.

• 1:44:05Speaker 06

  By the way, I, I think I speak five words now, like I have, you know, I just took it in school. But that was enough at the time to, you know, the recruiters got in, you know, if you, if you just had anything, I had some policy familiarity, you know, I was studying, um, Mideast history and politics in school and took, taking a little Arabic, 9/11, before 9/11, right, as you can imagine. 9/11 happens and I want to go and, and just do my part. And I think, okay, um, I grew up, and the two authors that had the most impact on me as a kid, um, were Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy. You ever read any Michael Crichton or Tom Clancy?

• 1:44:43Shawn Ryan?

  Oh yeah.

• 1:44:46Speaker 06

  They were the first, first of all, that I remember it, I was probably fourth grade, where I liked reading those books more than watching any TV show, or, you know, I got so into it that I would look for it. And that was really important.

• 1:44:59Speaker 06

  I know it sounds hokey or whatever, but, you know, to the degree you can get kids at the youngest possible age to develop a love of reading, it is. It's such a, it's been a godsend for me and I think it's so important for everybody else. Anyway, my only knowledge of any of this stuff was from reading like Tom Clancy books, honestly, about CIA. I knew nothing. I knew no one who would ever work there. I was heading to Wall Street basically as a kid, which again, for anyone who's watching this, they're like, yeah, he looks like, you know, looks like some dude who's sitting there like, buy, sell, you know, Hermes tie, French cuffs, you know. It's like, wow, like what's my, what's my piece of the pie on this deal, you know, and shouting and everything. I mean, look, I mean, we are what we are, right? I mean, I kind of grew up in New York City, grew up around that. And so I go to join the, why do I go to join the CIA?

• 1:45:44Speaker 06

  I go to join the CIA because I figure that would be the best usage of my skillset. And also, I'd worked at some think tanks and so people would always say like, you know, you should consider joining the agency. Like you should, it was put out there. So I wasn't coming out of totally left field with it, but, and so I, I applied. I mean, I just applied and I ended up going to work there and we can, you know, there's not a lot to say about that. Like, I feel like I'm sitting here, you know, walking in the footsteps of giants you've had from special operations community. I'm going to be like, yeah, like, I was writing this paper on the assessment for, you know, this province in Afghanistan and man, let me tell you, the coordination negotiations

• 1:46:26Speaker 06

  with other authors were really intense. So, you know, but I'm happy to, you know, talk about it a little bit. I do have some funny thoughts about the way that different agency personnel are depicted in the pop culture. But on a, on a serious note, I just feel like

• 1:46:45Speaker 06

  we all knew while we were there. There was this unspoken thing of our country was attacked, we are at war, we don't know where this is going, but you know, there's, there is a viciousness and an insanity to our enemy that has to be met with, you know, the full force of, of our republic and of all the people that we can muster together on this. And there was that unity and I will tell you it.

• 1:47:15Speaker 06

  It was interesting because even during the Bush years when I was there, you could tell there were people who they hated Bush so much that they weren't really, they, good news was bad news to them about the war in Iraq specifically. And that's a, I know that's a harsh thing to say, but there were people in that CIA office who I think were rooting for the surge to fail, for example. Not publicly, but I knew them, right? I was, I was a worker bee. I was, you know, a little, a little nobody in the bowels of Langley.

• 1:47:49Shawn Ryan?

  Looking back on that, can you see any reason why they'll be happy about that?

• 1:47:56Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe Cheney?

• 1:47:59Speaker 06

  Oh, I mean, they, they-

• 1:48:00Shawn Ryan?

  Halliburton?

• 1:48:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, they, they thought that, that the real enemy was here at home. There were people working in, certainly in the State Department, which unfortunately, it was a communist nest of infiltration during the McCarthy years. And there are still some people that are commies. I mean, they're not taking payment from, you know, the Soviets anymore, but there's very left wing radical ideology among some, again, we're speaking about organizations of thousands of people. And I know there are like kick ass former Marines who also go to work at State and they're great guys and they're patriots. So just for the purposes of getting it on the record, I'm speaking about the radicals within these institutions who unfortunately often find their way to the top of the institution, then they control the institutional power. Right? So I'm not casting, I have to deal with this with the FBI all the time. I get these FBI guys who are like, Buck, I love your show.

• 1:48:46Speaker 06

  I agree with you on everything. I think what you're doing is phenomenal for the country. Why are you bashing guys like me? I'm like, I'm not bashing guys like you. You're locking up, you know, mafia guys and cartel members and, you know, you're working out of like the Oklahoma field office. I'm talking about the guys in DC calling the shots who are trying to throw presidential elections and they're like, all right, I get it, you know, they get it, right? So it's a different thing.

• 1:49:09Speaker 06

  But you could already see the, the undermining of the mission. It was more important that, that Bush and, and the Republicans had their faces kind of, you know, rubbed in the dirt over Iraq, Afghanistan, whatever than-

• 1:49:28Speaker 06

  We actually start to see the progress that we need to stabilize and get the hell out of these places, right? That was a, I'm not saying that was a dominant theme, but there were people that were very, in my mind, very much aligned with that thinking. And it came, it came across to me during different things. And even in some of the briefings with senior Democrat personnel, like elected officials, members of Congress, things like that. It was clear that, you know, we'd show them the, like, declining casualty figures in Iraq, things like that. And some of them, people arguing with me on this, some of them were disappointed. More important to be able to be in power here at home and deal with the enemy here at home than whatever's going on overseas.

• 1:50:12Speaker 06

  And that was a change in my under, because I arrived CIA, I'm like, I just want to help. Like, how can I do whatever I can for this mission, right? And, and like I said, like, we're just like, oh, my God, you know, we thought, we thought of the, I mean, so I was an analyst. I know you've had case officers here. So, you know, case officers are, you know, great at telling you how to deal with your third ex-wife. But, you know, I was, I mean, it's true, right? So, you know, the case officers used to give the, us little analysts a hard time. But, you know, we looked at like the, whenever we went overseas, you know, I went overseas a couple of times as an analyst, you know, short stuff, nothing, nothing very interesting.

• 1:50:54Speaker 06

  But, you know, we looked at the JSOC guys as like, I'm going to just admit it, as like, superheroes. We were just like, oh, my God, like, what these guys are doing, like, it's amazing, you know? And like, we thought it was, it was just to even be, you know, in the vicinity of their skill set and their devotion to mission and what they were doing for the country, like, I'm like, this is why, this is why I joined the CIA, just, just to try to even be near this team, just to, just to do whatever, you know, to, to, you know, to sit there and, you know, brief the general about what's going on here, so then he, you know, whatever, whatever it is that I, you know, we can do. And I was obviously, I mean, I did go into two Oval Office briefings, so I keep saying I was just kind of a whatever, but I ended up, you know, doing well as an analyst, because...

• 1:51:38Speaker 06

  I'm a big nerd and I read a lot, so I was good at that job. But it was apparent to me that that sense of like, we're all on the same team, we're all on the same mission. We got these guys out. And I don't want to just talk to the JSI guys. It's obviously also, you know, National Guard guys doing amazing work and taking tremendous sacrifice. But anytime I got any static from the, from inside of Langley, from people who, first of all, were very, they were like policing lang-, they would police language over, you know, like jihadi, you know, and other things that we would refer to them like, oh, we, you know, don't.

• 1:52:18Speaker 06

  Do you know what I mean? Like, there was a little bit of, you know, let's not, let's not dehumanize all the Zarqawi guys that quickly, okay? You know, they have, they have families too. And we're like.

• 1:52:29Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, so this was happening a lot earlier than I thought.

• 1:52:31Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:52:32Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:52:33Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:52:34Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I saw it happen. I didn't see it that early.

• 1:52:37Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, maybe I see the Zarqawi on the wall, so maybe like, you know, move, move the timeline. But I'm telling you, when the Obama administration started and it was all Iraq, bad war, Afghanistan, good war. By the way, how's that look now? I mean, when you really think about it, right? You know, I think, I think there is a strong argument, you know, against Iraq, obviously, a very strong one. But I think the way that Afghanistan was handled, I was, I mean, I was in Afghanistan in 2010. Again, short stuff, just in and out of country, nothing, nothing remarkable or even vaguely impressive. But, I mean, I did have access to like the very, the top level assessments and intelligence

• 1:53:18Speaker 06

  that were going on there. And I just remember thinking to myself, like, this is never gonna work. And all these other people in country at the time, on the intel side, were like, yeah, this is never gonna work. And then I'd go and I'd meet with these military guys. And again, you gotta remember, I'm like a twenty something, you know. Now I'm a forty one year old man, I even have a little bit of hair on my face. You know, I don't look like a kid or just, I look like a kid who just got out of a, you know, fraternity party when I joined the CIA. Because, basically because I did. Because I did, I was like twenty two, twenty three years old. And I was a kid and I just was like, I wanna help. I mean, that was just my attitude. I was like, I don't, you know, I'll make money later on in life. I just wanna find a way to help these guys. But I'd go over there and I'd meet with, you know, whether it was like an ODA team

• 1:54:00Speaker 06

  or, you know, all the way up, you know, I briefed the four star and country and stuff. You know, this stuff sound, when you're, when you're, it's kinda funny when you're an analyst, like, this stuff's like, oh, you almost think of it as like these resume bullets. Like, I was talking like this important person. Then you get older, you're like, most of those guys were schmucks and didn't really know anything and were just kinda covering their asses and, you know. But when you're in it, you know, there's this sense that these people, the adults are in charge, right? I'm a twenty something year old kid, you know, who's there on behalf of the CIA and I'm talking to, you know, these guys who are, have real responsibility and real authority. And there's just this assumption like, well, they must, they must be competent, they must be smart, they must have the best interests of their soldiers at heart.

• 1:54:46Speaker 06

  Not necessarily, some of them, again, some of them, we're speaking in generalities, but not all of them. And I think the deal in Afghanistan was that, you know, I saw this play out a lot, where you had, you know, the people who were doing the fighting, the people who were in, you know, at the village level, they were seeing what the reality was. And by the time it got up to, you know, brigade or whatever, I never served, so I didn't even really know the terminology very well. I just was, you know, coming in there, like, doing the analyst thing. And what they would, by the time it would get up, it would always be, well, you know, there are challenges, but we're making progress.

• 1:55:32Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, looking back.

• 1:55:33Speaker 06

  And they weren't, by the way, they weren't making progress.

• 1:55:34Shawn Ryan?

  Looking back, do you, do you, I wanna ask about, what do you think about Cheney and Halliburton in the Iraq war?

• 1:55:44Speaker 06

  Oh, man. I got, I mean, I was in college when that stuff was breaking out, so I gotta go way back here. I mean, Cheney and Halliburton, hm. Look, I think some of that stuff is, I think some of that is.

• 1:55:59Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think that had anything to do with us going in there?

• 1:56:01Speaker 06

  No, Cheney was a, he's gonna, he's a rich guy, he's a rich guy anyway. I don't think that Halliburton stock price is pushing him to push for a war. I think that there were neoconservative interventionists in the US foreign policy establishment, and particularly at the top of the Republican Party, who really believed that there would be this flowering of democracy. But they were wrong. I mean, they were, they got it wrong. And there was the WMD thing, which I, I was in the Iraq office, right, in the CIA. So, not when the WMD thing happened, but later on. You can imagine, though, you know, everyone was kinda, uh-oh. That wasn't good. So, I think, uh, you're probably, honestly, you're probably much more up to speed

• 1:56:45Speaker 06

  on Cheney and Halliburton than I am. When I, when I got into things-

• 1:56:49Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not up to speed on it, I just know what I saw. And what I saw was every single thing in country. Fuel points, buildings, cooks, cleaners, construction, everything. All logistics were, were Halliburton. Everything, in both Afghanistan and Iraq. And at the time, you know, I was like you, I was 20, 22, 23, 24 years old, killing bad guys, kicking doors in, doing what I wanna do. Defend the country, fight for my country, take the fight to the enemy. But now, you know, 20 years later, looking back, it, I, it makes me wonder.

• 1:57:32Speaker 06

  So, you know, there are, you know, there are, there are things that I think I know, and the things that I wanna know, right? A lot of what I've been talking about are things that I believe, obviously, very strongly in and have thought about. My, my, one of my skillsets is, is almost, uh, almost an OCD-level obsessive thinking about things. Like, I'll just keep thinking about, you know, a complicated problem or an issue. I'll just keep going to it, keep going to it. And, you know, as an analyst or somebody who's operating in that realm, that can, as long as you direct it toward that and not, you know, gonna leave the gas stove on or something, like, it can be very effective, right? You go, wait, did I, did I? But, uh, I, I don't have-

• 1:58:13Speaker 06

  Because I really just haven't even thought about, I focus more on Afghanistan and for obvious reasons in recent years and what happened there and the realities of it. I mean, I remember, what was it, Mike Shoyer, remember Mike Shoyer, he wrote that book, Imperial Hubris, he was an agency guy. And he used to do like Russia Today and you know, he would, you know, obviously was ex-formally in and he wrote this book. I, actually, I think it was anonymous, but the book was anonymous, but here, can I, I need to check this, I need to get this right. I'm not sure if it was ever actually attributed to him, but anyway, he's a former agency guy and he was one of the guys who would talk about how, this is when I was in college,

• 1:58:52Speaker 06

  how Afghanistan is just like, it's just not gonna work. Like, we can go there and kill bad guys, we gotta get out, but this whole nation building thing of any kind, no chance. That, he wrote that book in like 2002, I think, I mean, it was right at the very beginning. So, you know, I sit here and I think about Afghanistan a lot and I think that, you know, people weren't able to, if they, it's not, I think that it's just hard to get truth all the way up the, all the way up the system for political reasons. On Iraq, I want it, I would, I would be open to knowing more about the beginnings of it and how it all happened. I mean, I was a, when we invaded Iraq, I was a junior in college.

• 1:59:35Speaker 06

  So, and it's kind of remarkable now in retrospect, like I see, I see guys who are my age when I showed up at Langley and I'm like, oh, it's like a kid, you know what I mean? I mean, I'm 41, I still look like a kid to a lot of people, but I am 41, so I'm getting old now. And, you know, there was, I just didn't know anything, right? I just, I just wanted to, I just wanted to help. I didn't like to use, I didn't want to say, like, when people say thank you for, you know, sometimes people say, you know, thank you for your service or something, knowing that I'm CIA, I mean, I've never, never served the military, I'm just like, no, I didn't serve, I tried to help. That's how I just thought of it, like, I'm trying to help out. You served, those guys served, I'm helping, I'm doing whatever I can.

• 2:00:15Speaker 06

  And honestly, it felt like it wasn't enough, too, that was one of the reasons. People ask why I left.

• 2:00:20Speaker 06

  It kind of felt like, what am I, you know, what is my, what is my contribution here, really? You know, I think the intelligence agencies are really bloated, really bureaucratic, often lack a sense of mission, eat their own, throw people under the bus for nonsense bureaucratic bullshit. You know, the internal sort of security functionaries just constantly harass people with no, for no good reason. And the best, the best people often leave. That was my experience. Every hard-charging, legit, you know, person that you would think of as a CIA officer for my office, who you would want in that job, you know, obviously not, not door kickers,

• 2:01:05Speaker 06

  not, not warfighters, but doing what they were doing. With few exceptions, there are few exceptions, I'd say 75% of the people that I thought were badass at their job left. 25% stayed, but 75% left. Yeah, I think that's true in just about all government entities. I mean, I, I believe it. And, you know, there just needs to be a total rethink. Look, I mean, I, I talked to Trump about whether I'd be able to and willing to help him. And I know people think it's crazy because I only spent, what, four or five years in, but go in and just like help, just clean up the mess in these places. There's institutional rot. There is ideological, ideologically, I think it has gone astray in a lot of ways in these

• 2:01:50Speaker 06

  places. And it's not just because I have friends who are sending me like transgender awareness day bulletins from Langley, you know, it's stuff beyond that. So, yeah.

• 2:02:45Speaker 00

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• 2:02:59Speaker 01

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• 2:03:01Speaker 03

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• 2:03:09Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

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  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd, rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 2:03:22Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Buck, on the break, we just got back from the break and we were kind of talking about how the CIA has changed over the years. I know you have a lot to say on this, so let's dive in.

• 2:03:34Speaker 06

  You know, I have friends who are still in and they all know what I do and what I've done. When I got into media and commentary, very few people who were former CIA were doing it. There were a handful of us, but now it's like we're everywhere, right? There's people all over the place, the security state is taking over the airwaves. And I, but of the ones that are still in, I would talk to them, I would say, you know, how is it over there? And they'd just give me their very general assessments, but it's unsurprising, I'm sure, for everyone to hear. It's woke, just like so much of the rest of the federal government is at this point in terms of policy.

• 2:04:18Speaker 06

  And without the war on terror, or whatever you want to call it, to be the primary mission,

• 2:04:28Speaker 06

  I think people are much more concerned with some of the bureaucratic, both naval gazing and activism that's going on. Real concerns.

• 2:04:39Shawn Ryan?

  How bad is it over there?

• 2:04:40Speaker 06

  I mean, I had a friend who was going to come out and, and he reached out to me and he said he was all fired up to, to come out. I mean, when I was in the CIA, I mean, I actually created something called the Freedom Meter, which was like, it was always like a poster we put up at the office and it was like measuring freedom, you know? It was like Team America was like very high and like Reagan, and then you kind of go down this. And it was like, it was a joke, right? And everyone thought it was pretty funny. I mean, we just won. It was like, you know, board analyst guy stuff and created the freedom meter, some people called it. And I remember that like one of the sort of more woke managers one day was like, you guys

• 2:05:25Speaker 06

  realize this is a Hatch Act violation, right? A what? Hatch Act violation, federal law, Hatch Act. And I was like, it's a Hatch Act violation? Like, it's a fucking joke. Like, what are you talking about? Oh, but because Reagan was on the poster and like a positive, I mean, there were like, like Freedom Fries were on there like low. I mean, it was a joke. It was a joke. Yeah. No sense of humor. No sense of humor allowed. And but, you know, it wasn't that it was inappropriate. It's that it was a violation of law because it was in a federal office and it like had something positive to say about a long-dead Republican president,

• 2:06:07Speaker 06

  basically, among all the other things. So I was aware of this idea there, right? I was aware that this was a thing, that there, because everyone was, I mean, When was that? Guys in my office, oh, that would be like, beginning of the Obama administration, 2009. Yeah, that's when that went down. Yeah, 2009. So, and I remember that, and I was like, and we took it down. We're like, all right, like, whatever. Fine, I don't want, you know, because in a lot of these places, unfortunately, some of the worst people are the ones that do the internal security stuff, as you well know. I mean,

• 2:06:45Speaker 06

  you know, I just, it's like the worst dean of your high school, like the worst high school dean imaginable, but actually given the powers of the federal government. They never find anyone who's actually doing anything. Like, they never actually stop any of the leaks or any of the bad stuff. They just harass everyone who's actually trying to do their job and be a good person and wants to be a patriot and serve. They just annoy the shit out of those people. How fast do you think this happened? What? From? Oh, from, from the transformation that I saw.

• 2:07:19Speaker 06

  So I mean, I wasn't there very long. So you'd have to say very long at all. You'd have to say it was rapid. But I mean, I can tell you that I I increasingly felt uncomfortable in that place with the start of the, you know, with the start of the Obama administration. Not because I wasn't willing to serve the mission under a Democrat president, but just because the, you know, it was almost like the attitude of a lot of people, including people in positions of influence in there was, you know, the idiot king is gone and now the glorious monarch shall reign. And I was just, it just was bizarre to me. I was like, what are you guys even, what are you guys even talking about here? Like, we're in the Afghanistan war. Obama has no idea what the hell he's doing. Like, we're gonna

• 2:08:02Speaker 06

  surge, but we're gonna, we're gonna end the surge before, say when we're ending the surge, while we're doing it. I mean, the whole thing was just a complete mess. And I think you just started to see some of the elements of what now you call the woke or, or the more radical left asserting, asserting themselves inside the institution. And I mean, you can see this because some of the people who were running it then, fast forward, they're signing the Hunter Biden laptop is fake letter. So I'm not, you know, this isn't something that I've just come up with on my own out of nowhere and there's no basis for this. And you had people that were running these institutions became liars, became propagandists

• 2:08:44Speaker 06

  for the regime, for the collective, for the apparatus, and, and did tremendous damage to it. And they're doing this. The, the decision to politicize everything has been a long time in the making. But in this country, the move to politicize everything has rapidly accelerated over the last 15 years.

• 2:09:07Shawn Ryan?

  That's, yeah, I feel like it's rapidly accelerated in the last three years.

• 2:09:11Speaker 06

  Well, for sure. I, I think it's almost like, you know, a rolling, a, a boulder rolling down the hill, right? Like, it takes a little bit, but now it's at, it's, it's getting to its maximum velocity.

• 2:09:23Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I was having a discussion about this a couple of days ago with somebody, and they, they think that

• 2:09:30Shawn Ryan?

  They're losing all these agendas. They think that they're losing and that's why it's going full force. We're not stopping. We're just going for cats out of the bag.

• 2:09:42Speaker 06

  They think the left thinks they're losing? Oh, man, I wish whoever this is, I gotta go back and listen to some Sean Ryan podcast episodes here.

• 2:09:49Shawn Ryan?

  It wasn't on the show.

• 2:09:50Speaker 06

  Oh, it wasn't on the show. People you talk to, okay. Because I was gonna say, I I think that they increasingly view themselves as unconstrained by the rules of the game as we've known them for a very long time. I think that the push doesn't come from a place of their ideas are weak, their arguments are weak. So that's always going to be a an insecurity. But in terms of their their power within the system, I mean, they're about to indict, again, I should say, further indict, the Republican nominee for the presidency. They're gonna try to take him out using the judicial system as a weapon. And I do believe they're

• 2:10:29Speaker 06

  gonna try to lock him up in prison. And and that, to me, that's what you do when you think that you can finish off the opposition. That's not what you do when you're worried that you're not going to be able to, you know, keep it all going or keep it all going together.

• 2:10:44Shawn Ryan?

  They were saying that the agenda's been accelerated out of desperation, and it's showing signs of desperation now. And then that only happens when you're about to lose.

• 2:10:55Speaker 06

  Well, I hope that they're right.

• 2:10:57Shawn Ryan?

  I hope they're right.

• 2:10:58Speaker 06

  Because that's that's positive, at least, right? I mean, if that's really the if that's really the, you know, the position that that they find themselves in, I just I would want to push more on that. By the way, I love optimistic narratives about where the country's going. I want to hear them all the time because I live in this world of constantly facing what I think the problems are and trying to trying to help people who have, you know, their own lives they're leading, their jobs they're doing, their families they're raising, help them understand exactly what's happening in these different places, and then get people as motivated and energized as I can to do whatever they can in their own way to tackle it, right? So that means you're looking at a lot. I'm looking at problems

• 2:11:42Speaker 06

  in the country more than anything else. I mean, I could sit here and talk about a lot of great things about America, too, as we all could. But so narratives that we're heading in an optimistic direction, I'm certainly very open to. I just think the data points indicate the opposite, which is that they are they're ascendant. And I mean, so here's an example, right? John Fetterman, Senator from Pennsylvania. You can look at this and say, he is so it's so pathetic that they put forward this guy who is neither intelligent, nor charismatic, nor accomplished, or you know, kind of wears the schlumpy hoodie everywhere and the whole thing. And and obviously had a major stroke and was not really capable, not really up for doing the job that he was

• 2:12:25Speaker 06

  doing, that he would be doing in the Senate. You can say, that's a desperation move, or you can say, that's a what the hell are you gonna do about it move? We can get away with this, too. What are you gonna do? What's your move now? And I tend to fall in the latter category. I tend to think that the brazenness doesn't come from desperation from the left. It comes from a sense that they are empowered and getting what they want. I mean, that's, that's how I see it.

• 2:12:54Shawn Ryan?

  I'm, I'm, I'm very similar to you. I look at all the problems and, and I don't, as much as I hate to say this on, on the show, I don't see a lot of positivity, you know, and so, yeah, I'm looking for the positive narratives as well. And, and you're a lot more spun up on this than I am, because of your show and everybody that you are around and, and the access that you have. But I just wanted to hear what you thought about that.

• 2:13:20Speaker 06

  No, sure. No, look, it's, I, I love hearing points of view that can make me feel more hopeful about, about the future of the country. I think it's necessary, too, because you can get, yeah, I mentioned Michael Crichton before, and he had an insight. This is the, for everyone, I'm sure everyone knows, but just, you know, wrote Jurassic Park, created the show ER, wrote Andromeda Strain, Congo, Rising Sun. I mean, you know, it was just like a bestseller machine back in the 80s and 90s. And he gave an interview once where he said, which you have to understand is that catastrophism always, catastrophism is always interesting, and it goes beyond interesting to people. I mean, he means it catches people's

• 2:14:03Speaker 06

  mindset, catches their attention. He said that it's at a point where if you want people at a cocktail party, or, you know, at a, in kind of a setting to pay attention to you. Talk about, you know, catastrophism. Because if you talk about how good things are, they'll get mad at you. And I always thought that was so interesting. Because everyone's generally so focused on the possibility of collapse and destruction and, you know, challenges, your brain, right? We've, from an evolutionary standpoint, we're supposed to survive, reproduce, like that's, you know, stay safe, stay fed, reproduce, like that's what we're supposed to do. And in our modern society, we don't really have it anymore. So we have this, we have these, uh, you know, the, what is it? The amygdala, like the lizard brain.

• 2:14:48Speaker 06

  And we have these things that are are honed to keep us alive, that instead start focusing on, you know, oh, like what's gonna happen with that next promotion? Or what's gonna happen with climate change? Or people get all these fixations. But it's hard, because if you try to tell people that overall, I always say I'm very optimistic about the day to day. I'm pessimistic about the future. So I don't know if that's, I don't know if that's helpful for people. But I mean, I think, you know, you you make the most you can out of the relationships and of, you know, what you are in your life to your community, the people around you. You take care of yours. You push, you know, you, you live in truth. You push for your, your community, your, your country as much as you can. And, you know, no one knows what's gonna happen in 10 years.

• 2:15:31Speaker 06

  No one knows what's gonna happen in a year.

• 2:15:34Shawn Ryan?

  I'm always looking for positivity too. And, and you said earlier in the interview that you think that this Marxism, this extreme agenda, a lot of it's coming from the educational system.

• 2:15:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:15:49Shawn Ryan?

  It's more and more, I see people yanking their kids out of school, doing homeschooling, putting them in private school. Now with this chat GPT stuff, people aren't writing papers anymore. I was just talking to somebody that goes to Harvard, Harvard Business School right now, and they were all, it's a veteran. They, they were all excited to get in there. They're in an Ivy League school now and they're there. And everybody there is having chat GPT, write their papers, which in my mind, it seems like universities are gonna come, become completely irrelevant. So do you think there may be a shift?

• 2:16:34Shawn Ryan?

  Now, at the same token, they'll use AI to manipulate the entire population, I'm sure, but.

• 2:16:42Shawn Ryan?

  More and more people are coming out of the educational institutions. Do you think that could change?

• 2:16:47Speaker 06

  See, the only challenge I ever show, every time you ask me a question, there's like 15 things that I want to say in response to your questions, because I think they probe right into, you know, a lot of areas I want to go. So let me, let me try to, I need to be taking notes when you're talking about these things. I think that on the, on the school, let's do schools and then university, okay? So on the school front, there is an awakening about what is being taught to children in schools. Here's an example.

• 2:17:16Speaker 06

  Governor, now that's my home state governor stuff, and it was when I wanted to keep talking about Governor DeSantis, but I also think he's been the model for Republican governors. People can say whatever they want about who their favorite presidential candidate is. I don't, I don't take positions in Republican primaries for presidents. I don't do it. I don't take positions in Republican primaries, period. Because I focus my, you know, fire on the enemy, so to speak. But, uh, he, he did a, a press conference, because I keep saying that they're banning books. You'll hear this, they're banning books. They're not banning books. I mean, if you, if you say that, you know, XXX films are not to be in the school library

• 2:17:58Speaker 06

  for kids to take out and watch at home, you're not banning adult, you know, films or pornography. You're just saying, we don't want this in the school library, right? This is very straightforward. When they say, we don't want certain books in the third grade curriculum or in the, you know, grammar school library, that's, it's exactly the same thing. But you'll notice it's a big talking point on the left. They say they ban books all the time. It's not true. And they want to connect it in people's minds to the Nazis burning books. I mean, you know, there's always, the left is much better at language than we are, which is something else we can talk about if you want. The left is much better at branding via language. But the DeSantis press conference, they had to pull away, meaning the media had to pull

• 2:18:41Speaker 06

  away from, because he was showing what was in these books. I mean, you're talking about, you know, like, again, it's uncomfortable you didn't describe it, but you're showing that, you know, fellatio and you're showing, you know, to children. In these books, this is what's actually-

• 2:18:58Shawn Ryan?

  That's actually in the book.

• 2:18:59Speaker 06

  In the books.

• 2:19:01Shawn Ryan?

  For third graders.

• 2:19:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, for third graders, they have access to it. The media had to pull away from what DeSantis was showing in the books that are allowed because they couldn't air it, Sean. And that was the whole brilliance of the press conference. "Oh, you think we're banning books? You can't even show your adult audience what is in these books that the Democrats want in these school libraries." By the way, the Don't Say Gay bill, another thing in that state, which is not the Don't Say, uh, not actually a Don't Say Gay bill, it's the Parental Rights in Education bill. But, um, Democrats by a majority in the state of Florida were in favor of it, which you never heard about. Because they, they don't want their kids being told, a majority, not all of them, there

• 2:19:44Speaker 06

  are some who are, you know, "My eight-year-old is like a non-cisgender," you know, whatever, right? That's very sad and child abuse and it's a whole other conversation. But the Democrats in the state of Florida, the ones who were, you know, seeing this with sanity to their credit, they were in favor of it. So, you know, of the bill, the Parental Rights in Education bill. So, people are awake on the school level and homeschooling, but, but even more than that, why allow this, why allow your local school board to be run by zealot lunatics?

• 2:20:14Shawn Ryan?

  Well, is this out, is this out in the media at all, these, DeSantis showing these books? Because I'm going to insert the clip on this episode.

• 2:20:22Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, for sure, yeah, you can find it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they had, they, they pulled away from the press conference because DeSantis held a press conference where he's like, "Look at what's in these books."

• 2:20:30Speaker 07

  And so today, we're going to be exposing, we've already exposed with that video, I think, this idea of a, of a book ban in Florida that somehow they don't want books in the library. That's a hoax. Uh, and that's really a nasty hoax because it's a hoax in service of trying to pollute and sexualize our children.

• 2:20:48Speaker 06

  It's crazy. This is the thing, I think people, you know, we all wanna live our lives and you can get desensitized to the level of crazy that's out there right now, just because, or I can't even say, there's desensitization, but there's also just, you wanna remove yourself from it, you're like, how is this, uh, like, I just, we can't even engage because some of the, well, we have to engage. And parents are finding out, and again, speaking from, speaking as a result of people I know who've joined school boards, I have a friend, Ryan Gerdusky, who now at a national level is trying to push for more involvement, it's, he's got a PAC, he tries to push for more, you know, conservative parents to get involved in their school boards. It's really important, I mean, what your kids are being taught, you

• 2:21:33Speaker 06

  know, I, it's sad, I have people that will call on the radio show, and, or usually, actually, these are more emails, you know, there's so many ways people reach out to you, reach out to me, they'll email and they'll say, you know, my, my 20-year-old has come back from Oberlin, you know, or Mizzou, or, you know, wherever, Reed College, Wesleyan, my 20-year-old has come back and thinks that I, thinks that my husband is like a mansplaining, you know, white supremacist troglodyte, and I, you know, I'm not woke enough, and, you know, all of this other stuff, like, what do I do? And there's no good answer, because

• 2:22:13Speaker 06

  at that point, I mean, the process has gone so far along, that if you weren't building those values, and really building wisdom and virtue, things that no one even talks about anymore, building wisdom and virtue in your children at a young age, because that is their only defense against this stuff later on. The, the reality is, I think, that some people are too late on this, and then there's the, the school component. I mean, like, I know a ton of people went to business school, I almost went to business school, I went to, I went to the media instead, and it was because I didn't wanna take out loans, honestly, I was just like, I, I just didn't want debt, I hate debt. Strategic debt is fine, right, like, buying properties that are an asset, but student loan debt, ooh,

• 2:22:56Speaker 06

  I didn't want it. And I thought about business school. People have to understand that most universities now are a credentialing program where the credential becomes less and less valuable with each passing year. Nobody cares.

• 2:23:15Speaker 06

  No one has ever given me a job because of where I went to school. No one has ever really cared, I think, about where I went to school. It's always just been about hustle, finding the right place, the right time, maneuvering, being relentless. That's, you know.

• 2:23:32Speaker 06

  I gave a, I gave a talk to my high school, actually. This is when I was CIA, so they would still, I used to get invited to speak places. Like at my schools, they don't, they don't invite me anymore. They, they, they don't, I'm like, I'm toxic. Now that I host with Clay, the, I mean, maybe, you know, it's either Hannity or, you know, us. I mean, we're basically on 500 stations, you know, each, something like that, you know. But, so it's one of the biggest, I'll just say, one of the biggest radio shows in the country, certainly in the top three.

• 2:24:03Speaker 06

  And

• 2:24:06Speaker 06

  they wanted, you know, I don't get it in my college. I'm dead to my school, which is kind of funny, because I used to invite me. I actually, I spoke with a SEAL a long time ago, me and a SEAL. I was active CIA, they, they let me go just to talk about national security stuff. It's great, we got super wasted afterwards, really fun. I'll give you the name after, he's a fun guy. He was a couple of years ahead of me. They don't invite me anymore, but anyway, in high school, because I'm a right wing extremist, as you may know. I'm a right wing extremist, according to media definitions now and all the rest of it. So my high school, though, I went to a, a place in New York City called Regis, which is a remarkable institution. Usually people, you know, no one cares about anyone's high school, right? I think this place is interesting just because it's,

• 2:24:49Speaker 06

  it was the closest thing to a meritocracy that I ever experienced in education, because it's a free school, it's a scholarship school, you go for free. And it's like a hundred thousand dollar scholarship. I mean, it's a private school where there's no tuition, because everyone in the alumni network basically donates. And it's funded that way. There's an original grant from a wealthy family a hundred years ago, give or take, and more than that now, and people fund it. So it's a scholarship school, and it was an intense place. And I, I, I wouldn't even say I enjoyed it, but it was a good place for me to be. They invited me, though, to give a talk on the fly. And just about to the seniors about how to get jobs. And I remember it's and I didn't prepare anything. I just sort of stood in front of them. I was like, so all of you guys.

• 2:25:32Speaker 06

  Your school is top 10 nationally for average SAT. You all were valedictorians of your great schools before you came here. You're all going off to, you know, elite colleges. And I was like, nobody really cares, just so you know. Yeah, maybe you'll go to a really good grad school after this. You may play the system. But I was like, for a lot of you guys. You're every, every job you're gonna want, you're competing against. 50, 100, 500 other people with 4.0 grade average and went to a great school and you know, it's just. The and then when you add into this. You know, diversity and inclusion and affirmative action and.

• 2:26:13Speaker 06

  Legacy stuff and, you know, whose uncle is. The senior vice president for whatever. I mean, when you add all these things in. It's trench warfare out there, man. You just gotta figure out what you can do. So I think that changes the calculation for a lot of people. On the it would certainly change my calculation. I mean, I know plenty of people with MBAs who shouldn't have gotten MBAs.

• 2:26:36Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think the AI stuff is gonna is gonna alter universities? And do you think people are gonna start? I mean, it seems like AI is going to make a lot of occupations completely irrelevant. They're already saying attorneys are going to become irrelevant. Architects are going to become irrelevant. A lot of medical professions are going to become irrelevant.

• 2:26:57Shawn Ryan?

  Media might become irrelevant.

• 2:26:59Speaker 06

  Let's not get crazy.

• 2:27:00Shawn Ryan?

  I hope it doesn't.

• 2:27:01Speaker 06

  We are essential. We are the ultimate essential workers.

• 2:27:06Shawn Ryan?

  You know what I'm saying?

• 2:27:07Speaker 06

  Oh, of course.

• 2:27:07Shawn Ryan?

  Everything, everything can be replicated now.

• 2:27:12Speaker 06

  Well, and there's another component of this too, which is. We've, we've been dealing with this point with, you know, fake news and. And propaganda that while different than the delivery system. Is generally rooted in the messaging and the approach with AI. You can actually have the fabrication of fact. Right. Mm hmm. Meaning it's visually indistinguishable between the real video of Congressman so and so taking the bribe and, you know, we're entering that era. Mm hmm. Where the ability to understand truth versus falsehood and the ability to understand what real disinformation is and to discern those things, I think, is incredibly important.

• 2:27:54Speaker 06

  And I'm not even sure, I think we're gonna have to evolve along with it because, I mean, it was just a few years ago, people were like, well, I think that's a deep fake. And everyone's like, you know, deep fake, whatever. No, now there actually will be deep fakes. This will be your thing. And even if it's not genuine as a deep fake, being able to say it, I mean, look what they did with the, again, the Hunter Biden laptop, bears all the hallmarks of, so you can say, well, I don't know if this video is fake when it's real, but it bears all the hallmarks of AI-generated content. And that's all that it takes for a lot of people to say, you know what, I don't believe, I don't believe it's real. So we're heading into a realm of unreality that I think very few people are prepared

• 2:28:37Speaker 06

  for and how this affects the university system. Look, most college, most college education at this point is a four-year period of, you know, for a lot of people, socializing, maybe drinking and partying and doing the bare minimum and having the most fun they can with the idea that they'll get serious about life afterwards, not true about everyone, but true of most people at most schools. And increasingly, I think there's an understanding that the skills you get from these schools, because the humanities have been so polluted with Marxist nonsense and deconstruction

• 2:29:19Speaker 06

  of literature instead of actually reading it and understanding it, you know? Shakespeare didn't know anything. The professor that's telling you what Shakespeare should have said or why Shakespeare is a

• 2:29:30Speaker 06

  Misogynist, you know, white supremacist, radical, whatever, right? That's what you're, you know, being taught in a lot of these places now, just utter nonsense. So I think the whole university system is, uh, I mean, these are hedge funds that are operating classes now. That's what Harvard is. It's a hedge fund that has classes. And there's so many ways to get in that when someone tells me they went to a school and I'm supposed to think they're, I'm supposed to think that's impressive. I do not. I don't care. I don't know. It could be brilliant people go to these schools. Brilliant people go to MIT and Harvard and whatever. Morons go to them as well. That's a fact.

• 2:30:03Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I guess what I'm asking Buck is, do you think this could be a turning point? Because where I feel like in the last couple of years, we're hitting a turning point where parents are taking control of their kids' education again.

• 2:30:17Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 2:30:18Shawn Ryan?

  Like, like you said, COVID unveiled everything. It, it, we had a lot of bored people out there that started diving into what the hell is going on and uncovered all kinds of shit in every sector, right? Well, here in Williamson County, I brought this up on other shows, that more and more and more people are yanking their kids out of both public and private schools and homeschooling. Then you bring up this AI, then, then we bring up the AI stuff where, I mean, the, the the chat GPT is doing school for the students, which makes school irrelevant. At this point, it's becoming completely irrelevant.

• 2:31:01Shawn Ryan?

  The only thing that's relevant anymore seems to be the trades because nobody knows how to do this shit anymore.

• 2:31:06Speaker 06

  So.

• 2:31:07Shawn Ryan?

  And so when you had said, a lot of this deep state Marxism, Marxism, this kind of stuff comes from the educational system, you know, elementary school, high school, these kids are starting to be yanked out. Parent, a lot of people are leaving states where, where this stuff is really prevalent in school and moving into, to red states. Then you have this AI stuff with the universities, just like you were saying as well. Nobody gives a shit what school you went to anymore. It doesn't matter. I don't look at it when I'm hiring. I, I care less. I just want a work ethic, people that are proactive and know what the fuck they're doing. You know, and, and so what I'm asking, do you think that might be a turning point?

• 2:31:54Speaker 06

  I hope it is a turning point. I think it is a turning point. It's early. This is how I I view it. Parents are getting involved in a way that we hadn't seen before at early-stage education. And parents who I would consider traditionalists about education. It's not even, not everything is in the right-left paradigm, or, you know, conservative and liberal. I mean, it roughly approximates that, but people who are just saying, "I don't want my kids being brainwashed with with garbage nonsense," like the gender ideology stuff, which is the huge fight right now. Gender ideology, the Florida bill was about third graders and below. Just think about that.

• 2:32:37Speaker 06

  Who needs to teach gender ideology to a first grader? Like, what, what's, oh, anyway.

• 2:32:40Shawn Ryan?

  That's, that's what I'm getting at, though. It's that's why people are pulling out of elementary schools. And then the AI stuff is, I'm, I'm talking about the universities, because I think it encompasses all of them.

• 2:32:50Speaker 06

  So, so the, the, the elementary school story, I think, overall in this country is, the momentum and the trajectory is a, is a, is a positive one. So that's something, that's where we get into the hopeful side of things, because parents realize, you know, people listening to this right now, run for school board. You can do it and have an influence on what a whole lot of kids are learning. And people ask, "How do I get involved?" And it's just understanding that process, too, I think, can be really interesting for people. So, so that's, so, yes. Are we at a turning point? Yes. COVID was a big part of it. People are getting more involved, understanding what their kids are being, because if your, if your kids get brainwashed from kindergarten up through university, I mean, good luck. You know what I mean?

• 2:33:34Speaker 06

  They're your kids. You're gonna stay with them forever, do whatever you can for them. But in terms of making them see the world right side up, good luck. So, getting involved at younger. On the university side, yeah, I think, I think if, if you could short American universities in the stock market, you probably should. Because, one, the So what they'll say about AI and all that stuff is for any place that wants to be elite, the way around that, you know, to be in the cognitive elite, to be intellectually impressive, the way around that is you have to have in-person Procter testing only and things like that, right? There are some ways, I think for homework, like, good luck with homework,

• 2:34:19Speaker 06

  you're in a, you're in a different realm now. You're gonna send kids home with a word problem? Guess what? The word problem can be done by chat GPT, right? You know, you know, how many cups of water do we need before we fill the pail kind of a thing? That's not hard. But there's another issue here, and that is that universities no longer, they're coasting on the reputation of elitism, and they're coasting on the reputation even in the non-elite schools of the value of the four-year degree. And both of those things, the top schools and the value of the four-year degree are crashing for people who are really

• 2:35:00Speaker 06

  paying attention and know what's going on. A part of it, you see with the elimination in more and more places at some of the most elite schools of objective metrics for admission, and this is trying to get ahead of the Supreme Court decision that will come out within the next six weeks or so. That's going to, I believe, declare affirmative action in state schools unconstitutional. So I think that's gonna happen. So I'm making a prediction on your show. It'll be a five-four decision most likely, but, or maybe six-three, but it's gonna be declared unconstitutional. So I think that's interesting. So they're getting rid of objective metrics anyway. But the purpose of the university has become, as they've

• 2:35:42Speaker 06

  become completely taken over by the left, they're a credentialing system, and they're still able to both indoctrinate and then deploy the foot soldiers of the left, right? So Harvard or Yale or wherever, they get, I went to Amherst, not as fancy, but you know, it's okay. They take these people, they make sure they believe certain things, they take people who believe them also in the admissions process to try to weed out, you know, anyone who's like, I love America, the Constitution, not allowed. And then they give them entree into Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, the whole thing. And people wonder, well, hold on a second.

• 2:36:24Speaker 06

  How did, how did wokeness, how does, why does Bud Light have the trans influencer campaign? Or why does, why is Nike siding with the guy who's kneeling at the games or all this stuff? How does this happen? They have created factories of, of left wing activism that are tax advantaged, that have billions and billions of dollars to spend in a whole variety of ways. And then they send these kids off, now young adults, and they know what they're supposed to do, and that's what they're doing.

• 2:36:54Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, do you think these companies even care? I mean, what, how much, didn't Bud Light just lose like 55, was it 55 million? I can't remember the exact number. So somebody can fact check me and put it in the comments, but they, they lost a ton of money.

• 2:37:08Speaker 06

  Their sales are down as we speak, like 30% roughly, which is, you know, which is big money for them. And it's, it's hitting their... So this is, this is complicated. Look, it's, it's a, it's a win for the right because up to this point, the belief had been, and this was a really powerful thing, the left will boycott, the right will just suffer in silence. It's always been the belief in corporate America. It's been the belief as long as you and I have been alive, Sean, that if you do something that upsets the libs, they will mobilize, they'll be outside your corporate headquarters, they'll, you know, call your sponsors, whatever. And on the right, we go, I just want to buy a hammer. You know what I mean? Like, I just, I just want to buy a t-shirt. I don't really care. That doesn't work anymore.

• 2:37:53Speaker 06

  And this goes to a concept that actually makes me positive, or makes me optimistic for more of our optimism, about the end of the neutral space as a concept. When everything is politicized, talking about a neutral space just means you're seeding territory to the other side, because it's already, it's already happening. There is no neutral space here. So when you see with Bud Light, it's a win because now they have to pay, they have to pay attention. Oh, we can't just do this. But people will also probably point out in the comments or whatever, that they...

• 2:38:31Speaker 06

  They have a lot of brands. It's a global company. I think they'll weather the storm. They could probably shut down Bud Light as an independent brand if they wanted to for a period of time and then the company would still function. Remember, it's Inbev, the Brazilian company, bought Anheuser-Busch, and so it's a global brand. They own like Stella Artois, and they own dozens, and I can't even begin to name all the things they own. So it hurts them, but does it hurt them badly enough?

• 2:38:54Shawn Ryan?

  Probably not.

• 2:38:55Speaker 06

  That's, again, I see the positive in things, but I also want to always be honest with the facts.

• 2:39:03Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it worries me because it's just encompassing everything. It's encompassing sports, it's alcohol, it's entertainment, it's media, it's news, it's department stores. You been to a Target lately?

• 2:39:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:39:19Shawn Ryan?

  We haven't. We quit going.

• 2:39:21Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, it's funny, actually. My wife is one of those at Target, but she loves it. But I was thinking of the Target out in San Francisco that's all under Plexiglas, which is a whole nother talk we could have about where crime has gone in this country. They've got all the products.

• 2:39:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:34Speaker 06

  Every product is locked down, but no, I think corporate wokeness, we have on our side

• 2:39:44Speaker 06

  become aware of what's really happening and started to do more about it, which is a positive thing. But we're just at the very beginning of the process of really understanding this. I mean, I, I, this is something, I mean, I think it was maybe June of 2020, I went on a Twitter tear. And I was just like, look, I gotta tell, I'm paraphrasing myself here, but it was like 15 or 20 tweets, and I was like, if we don't, if someone on the right doesn't just, who's a billionaire, doesn't just buy one of these media platforms and just decide that it is an unsinkable aircraft carrier of like free speech and truth, like we are screwed.

• 2:40:24Speaker 06

  And Rush Limbaugh actually read the whole thing on his show when Rush was doing his thing.

• 2:40:32Speaker 06

  And so it went viral at the time a little bit. It's funny because like no one even remembers it, I guess now, but like Elon Musk then did come along and buy for, what was it 40 some odd billion dollars? And now we finally have a foothold. I bring it up just because, you know, there are a lot of people who can do a lot, whether it's on like particularly on the corporate side, who they stand on the sidelines, you know, they, you know, especially you have all these guys who have amassed tremendous wealth. And they don't want to deploy it in ways that could help really save the country because they don't want to get weird looks at the golf course.

• 2:41:11Speaker 06

  What does that say about those individuals? And I mean, I like to say this pretty openly now, you know, Elon Musk was kind of a beloved inventor on both sides. He was doing amazing stuff with, with, you know, Starlink and with SpaceX and Tesla. And now, oh, he's like public enemy number one because he wants there to be one social media platform that's free speech. But that's a guy who actually cares. How many other people are there out there who could hire? People who have been first of all targeted by the woke mob, but just in general hire people who are conservatives, elevate people who

• 2:41:48Speaker 06

  support what is true and right and good in the country. I just think there needs to be a a real mobilization of those who are in positions to do more.

• 2:41:58Shawn Ryan?

  I think you're right. I don't know if it's gonna happen. I mean,

• 2:42:02Speaker 06

  I'm an optimist, Sean, as I sit here. I'm an optimist.

• 2:42:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:09Shawn Ryan?

  Let's move into the Epstein stuff that just dropped.

• 2:42:13Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 2:42:15Shawn Ryan?

  Director of CIA, going to his town home to have meetings.

• 2:42:25Shawn Ryan?

  What would they be meeting about?

• 2:42:28Speaker 06

  The Epstein story across the board is one where the conspiracy theorists, so to speak, keep on looking like the ones that see what's really going on, meaning that it just gets, you have to believe more and more coincidences, you have to believe more and more of the official line, even though that doesn't really seem credible.

• 2:42:58Speaker 06

  I, my, my biggest question, so I, the answer about the CIA guy is, yeah, so many, I mean, Bill Clinton, and he wasn't CIA director, I think he was a deputy assistant secretary at State or something at the time, but now is the CIA director, which was getting so much attention.

• 2:43:16Speaker 06

  How did this guy, I can't even keep a list in my head of all of the super, you know, private movie screenings with Woody Allen, you know, had just had interactions with all these people, as a matter of public record, we know this.

• 2:43:33Speaker 06

  How did he manage to ingratiate himself with all these individuals? And how is it that nobody stopped to think? We don't know, first of all, some of them were hanging out with him after he was already a sex criminal.

• 2:43:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:50Speaker 06

  And that's a, by the way, you know, you have to remember, these are people for whom protecting their reputations generally is one of their most important, one of their most important considerations, right? You're a politician, you're a public figure, you're gonna hang out with a known sexual predator?

• 2:44:06Speaker 06

  You're gonna have no interest in finding, you're just gonna hang out with some guy who's in some 80 million dollar mansion in Manhattan and owns a private island off the, you know, US Virgin Islands and owns a mansion in Palm Beach, you're gonna hang out with him, why? What is he going to do for you? How did he get, I mean, Bill Gates spent a lot of time with him, and you look at the figures.

• 2:44:24Speaker 06

  If you believe that there was like a, an illuminati, you know, that there was a, a globalist elite that has similar aims and a similar view of humanity and is looking for total control. Those people, a lot of them, were in the Epstein orbit. I've never heard a good explanation for how that all came together. And I, I would, I can, I, there are some questions that I have about the Epstein thing that I'll put out there that I think are, so, and I've heard, I've heard from, you know, again, these are people without attribution.

• 2:45:04Speaker 06

  I've heard people who have made very specific allegation, and these are very connected, very powerful people, like names that everybody, every single person watching this or listening to this would know, have made very specific allegations about Epstein, but they lack the proof. They lack the proof and they're not going to put themselves in a position, not, not about Epstein, but about the other. Mm-hmm. The people involved. So, so how is it that we all understand that Epstein's operating a, we still don't know where his money really came from. They say it was consulting or something, but that's not, that's not credible, right? We know that he was effectively like given a house, I think, by, uh, what is it, the

• 2:45:48Speaker 06

  founder of, um, I can't remember the guy's name, but they, you know, by a billionaire. But we still don't know where the money came from, which is not that hard. You know what I mean? Forensic accounting, FBI is great at that. Where did the money come from? This guy's worth hundreds of millions of dollars, Sean. Yeah. You know what the first thing when this came out, people said, oh, he was a stock market trader. I, I, I know hedge fund guys. Has anyone ever heard of this guy? No. You can't, you can't make, you're not making $600 million, $800 million from Wall Street. No one's ever heard of you before. This is crazy, right? Didn't make his money that way. So they don't really know where his money came from, which is a huge red flag in and of itself.

• 2:46:33Speaker 06

  And then there's the, well, what was he doing? He's running, we believe, right? A blackmail, a surveillance and blackmail operation, which likely involved, from everything we can see, putting very powerful, very wealthy men in situations where they were engaged in sexual activity with underage girls, right? That, I believe, am I, am I on my own point with this so far? Like, that, is that right? Yeah. That is what the general belief is about what he was doing. How is it that we are sitting here now, after he, I don't know what you're gonna say, he committed suicide in the prison where no one had ever been able to commit suicide before? After Ghislaine Maxwell has also gone off to prison

• 2:47:18Speaker 06

  and we've learned nothing from her trial, Sean? Nothing? She's just gone away for 20 years? Just, you know, we're not, we're not hearing a word about it? Oh, okay. Not a single person, not a single person that I can think of, have we been told, is the actual target of this blackmail, with the exception of that British royal guy and, you know, whatever, Prince Andrew, right? And, and even, it seems that was Epstein, you know, targeting him specifically? And how did that all work out? Point being, how do you have a massive multi, at least multi-year, I mean, multi-decade blackmail operation with no targets?

• 2:48:01Speaker 06

  No one ever, no one ever has this answer for me. How do you have a blackmail operation where nobody was being blackmailed? One where you made hundreds of millions of dollars? And, and I think the answer is, you know, there's, there are people who have been able to adjust the system to their liking in a way that certain facts have not come to light. I'll give you something, a couple of other things, and other thoughts on this. Because also, you know, it's difficult because I think there probably are people who were, who did lunch with Epstein and they didn't know, right? I think that, that's a thing. I think that's pretty clear at this point. But I also think there are people who did know.

• 2:48:41Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, you have all these, you have all these billionaires that are going to... Take away the island. You have all these billionaires going to New York, staying in his town home with them. When I travel somewhere, I don't, I don't, I don't stay at their house, especially if it's for business. I get a nice hotel and I'm not a billionaire. I don't know any billionaires that stay at, do you?

• 2:49:05Speaker 06

  No, he clearly had an MO here where he wanted people to be. Uh, he wanted to sort of bring them into the web. And it is surprising that you would, I, I shouldn't say surprising. There are people whom I think the public would be surprised or have been surprised to find out weren't more on guard about the whole thing or weren't more aware. And when you start to think that through, you go, well, is it that they didn't know? Or is that they just pretended not to know? And that's, that's where things start to get dialed in a little bit more. But I will tell you a couple of data points that also go in the, there is no. So I think we can all agree, we don't really know where his money came from and it's massive wealth.

• 2:49:50Speaker 06

  Hundreds of millions of dollars. Okay. That's very strange. We should know, we should know where all this money came and went. It's all being done electronically. It should all be trackable. Oh, Swiss banking, there's no such thing as Swiss banking secrecy anymore. Give me a break. There, there's, there'd be ways to figure this out. Someone doesn't want to know. Beyond that, where's the blacklist, the target list, the black book, whatever? Where, where is the, um, where is the, the target set that he was blackmailing? If we all think he was blackmailing, who was there? We haven't been told that. Then if you go back to the earliest phase of the Epstein saga,

• 2:50:30Speaker 06

  he was given a plea deal that was so. I mean, I, I remember I asked my friend Andy McCarthy, who, uh, was a Southern District of New York prosecutor. You probably see him on Fox, great guy, like brilliant dude. I asked him about this specifically, this notion. And so he confirmed it for me. They gave Epstein a plea deal that excused his underage sex trafficking beyond a six-month, you know, basically, home confinement. I mean, it was a joke. It was like no sentence at all. And this was federal.

• 2:51:08Speaker 06

  But they also gave him a, that the plea deal covered him and unnamed possible co-conspirators. I asked Andy, I said, Andy, has this, you were in the Southern District of New York for like 23 years. Have you ever even heard of that before? A plea deal that gives immunity beyond the individual to unnamed individuals? He says, no, that's, that's, he told me, he says, that's not a thing. So you got a guy who is trafficking sexually underage girls. You got him nailed, dead to rights. And you give him the biggest sweetheart deal as a prosecutor anybody could ever imagine,

• 2:51:53Speaker 06

  the point where it's not even done in prosecutorial circles. Like, this isn't even a task. Why would you ever do that? There's no basis for this in law. And remember, there was the prosecutor, the federal prosecutor in Florida at the time, this came up during the Trump administration. He had to go. Because people were really upset about this when they figured out how the Epstein thing was initially, because there was all this focus on the Epstein trial. They said, wait, what happened back in, you know, the, whatever it was, the early, mid 2000s? When this first came up? So there's no explanation of that whatsoever, other than, and you've heard, I'm sure, the quote, you know, we think he belongs to intelligence, and there's been this other stuff out there. And then I'll just add one more fact to it to this.

• 2:52:35Speaker 06

  And I wish I had the like, here's who, you know, here's who he was working for, here's who he was targeting. I don't have it yet, because I'm just, you know, a guy, and I'm reading what I read in the news, and I'm trying to use the sources that I have. There are very powerful forces trying to stop us from knowing this. You know, Sean, when the FBI actually did a, I don't remember the year, but it was recent, in the last few years, they did a raid on his, on his home. And this was in the FBI, in the logs, I mean, you can actually check this one. They did a raid on his home, and they came upon tapes.

• 2:53:14Speaker 06

  Okay, they came upon what we would assume would be surveillance footage. Now, we know he had the whole house mic'd up, cammed up, the whole thing, right? Including the rooms that were specifically meant for, you know, illicit activity.

• 2:53:27Speaker 06

  You know, the FBI agent on the commanding, you know, whatever, his agent running the scene, reached out to Epstein's lawyers and let Epstein lawyers come and decide what was privileged and what was able to be taken. Let them sort it out.

• 2:53:44Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious?

• 2:53:45Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:53:48Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:53:49Shawn Ryan?

  It's funny to me that you have friends inside the FBI that get upset with you for talking shit about the FBI and then we're talking about this right fucking now.

• 2:53:59Speaker 06

  You know. They'll...

• 2:54:01Shawn Ryan?

  That's why nobody fucking believes you.

• 2:54:05Speaker 06

  FBI has gone into a very, as an institution, gone into a very bad place for a number of reasons, with the political situation, but on the Epstein thing, I mean, you think about the ferocity with which they went after Roger Stone for basically making a joke on Twitter DM. They go and they arrest this senior citizen in his silk pajamas with like 26 guys in tac gear and make a real show of it. And then you see what the federal law enforcement apparatus did for years and years and years to Jeffrey Epstein. You wonder, what are the priorities here?

• 2:54:48Speaker 06

  You know, they look, they go after Roger Stone for nothing, like it's the Bin Laden raid, and they call CNN to watch it, to humiliate him and put it on air. And we all know they did it. And the Epstein thing, no one has ever, by the way, all these things are brought up with you. I've never heard an explanation of this that didn't involve, "I don't know, that's really bad."

• 2:55:09Speaker 06

  So what does that, what does that tell you? You know, I hate when people say this goes all the way to the top. The Epstein thing goes really high. I don't know where it stops, but this is not, this is not the way the system tells us that it works. And you're being asked to believe a lot when you're asked to believe the official narrative of what's really happened there.

• 2:55:31Shawn Ryan?

  He's just involved with so many people. I mean, the Virgin Islands are subpoenaing, subpoenaing Larry Page at Google and JP Morgan for their ties with Epstein and human trafficking as of May 4, 2023. A federal judge ruled the JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank can be held physically liable for allowing Epstein to maintain his network of underage girls for sexual abuse, actively enabling him to continue his crimes. Do you think anything's gonna happen with that?

• 2:56:06Speaker 06

  This is where I go into the, I would love to believe that the system

• 2:56:10Shawn Ryan?

  Will do the right thing.

• 2:56:12Speaker 06

  Wants justice and will do the right, yeah, except, see, this is what I, you know, you want to, you want to believe this is party that wants to think the good guys, the cavalry's gonna arrive. Cavalry didn't arrive in time for all those young girls. Cavalry didn't show up to deal with that, you know, piece of trash when it would have really counted and done something. And I, I think it's, it's very hard for people to see all of these, all these moments where there was at best this failure and not feel like there's something, something else that is at work with all of it. I, I just, I think that there's no good explanations for how these things happen that don't involve.

• 2:56:57Speaker 06

  There is such a thing as a conspiracy, and some conspiracies are real. And with Epstein, I think we've seen the very kind of situation where incredibly powerful people will go to extreme lengths. I mean, there are few things that no matter how powerful and rich you are, will destroy you, you know, in the public eye and legally as fast as, you know, doing, you know, illegal acts with underage girls. So what are the very powerful people who Epstein was targeting? We assume there were people who he was targeting. What are they not willing to do? Or what lengths, what levers are they not willing to pull in order to make this sort of thing go away?

• 2:57:41Shawn Ryan?

  Nothing. I mean, they're having sex with underage women, you know? I mean, that doesn't get any worse than that.

• 2:57:49Speaker 06

  So that's, that's when you see, um, you know, and they remember the Epstein case, really. I think it was the Miami Herald wrote about it again in 2019. It had sort of faded. People weren't really talking about it for a long time. And then finally, there was this outrage about it. And there was a focus on it. But there's, it's just, it's just really disconcerting at the deepest level to see that this is a guy that should have been put away for, you know. Look, man, I don't like to do the thing where we compare

• 2:58:32Speaker 06

  this thing to that thing, or, you know, what aboutism. You had people on January 6th who didn't hit anyone, didn't break anything, didn't threaten anyone. And they were locked up like animals for 18 months in solitary confinement in a DC jail that was practically a gulag because they had the wrong politics and they're in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jeffrey Epstein was trafficking underage girls. And the system gave him a six-month, like, home confinement, go into a county jail for a couple of days a week thing and just, you know, made most of it go away. And then he kept doing it. That's the system. So you sit there and you say, is it a justice system?

• 2:59:20Speaker 06

  Doesn't feel like it to some people.

• 2:59:24Shawn Ryan?

  Speaking of, I mean, all these people have something dangling over their head. One thing I forgot to ask you about the Twitter files.

• 2:59:32Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 2:59:32Shawn Ryan?

  Is we heard from Musk time and time and time again about Fauci. And when they dropped the Fauci files and now that's gone. That's not going to happen. In fact, he even said, we need to move away from the Twitter files. Why do you think the Fauci stuff never came out and probably never will come out?

• 2:59:55Speaker 06

  Fauci is protected because he was the point man for really the biggest government fraud and abuse of our lifetime. So, and he understood, see Fauci is a political animal. He was the, before he retired, the most highly paid employee in the entire federal government, which is remarkable. You know, I know, federal government's big. There's a lot of people in the federal government. Highest paid federal government employee had lasted in his role for decades and decades. And he decided that the way, one, I think that he became a true megalomaniac.

• 3:00:37Speaker 06

  I think that he was overcome with narcissism and that at his stage in life, he became this figure who was elevated by some really sad, but millions of them, sad leftists into being almost like a deity. I think he started to believe in himself a little bit. I think that he disconnected from obvious reality and started to think the hero worship was rooted in the fact that he really was somebody who should be worshipped. And he also was critical to the Democrat plan of unseating Donald Trump and taking over the White House and taking power.

• 3:01:19Speaker 06

  He mobilized as a political operative for them. So they very, I mean, up to this point, he has been.

• 3:01:30Speaker 06

  You know the scene in The Departed where he's like, "That's a guy you can't touch." You know, he's a made guy, you can't touch him. He was a made guy. Fauci was someone that you couldn't get, couldn't get any kind of a political hit on. And I mean, I think what he did is evil. I don't think that it was beyond his knowledge that he was advocating for policies that were destructive economically, psychologically abusive. I think a lot of people died of drug overdoses, and I think a lot of people drank themselves to death. I think a lot of marriages were ruined. I think a lot of children were abused because Fauci was a coward who told Democrats, who are hysterical, what they wanted to hear, which was, "If you just listen to me, you'll be safe and you're a good person."

• 3:02:14Speaker 06

  There was a moral element to this, too, we have to remember. Even remember, if you got COVID, there was a period of time where people would say,

• 3:02:21Speaker 06

  "How'd you get it?" As if it's like, "What do you mean, breathing air, being around human beings?" That was a part of the madness. Why didn't Elon, or why hasn't the Fauci files really come out? I mean, I'll say one thing.

• 3:02:37Speaker 06

  My guess is that Fauci is, you know, he understands he's subject to FOIA. So my sense is that he's probably not super sloppy with what he would put down in the first place. That's on the, finding the most positive interpretation of it possible. I think it's also, and this is a bigger piece of it. Elon's taken on a lot with what he's doing with Twitter and is getting immense pressure. This is like a break in the dam of the collectivist Democrat, you know, control. I mean, this is, you finally have, and we can't even begin to, I think, understand

• 3:03:21Speaker 06

  how much personal and professional pressure he comes under as a result of this. And I think maybe he just decided that this isn't necessarily...

• 3:03:31Speaker 06

  Either it just wasn't that interesting, which is possible. Maybe they didn't have anything that good on Fauci specifically. I mean, I think we already, because I think we already kind of know. Or he just decided that to keep Twitter alive, not going to go full on Fauci thing. So those are those, that's my assessment. I know people can pick and choose what they think is right or wrong about that. That's how I see it. Yeah, and I would love to see it. I mean, I would love to see it. I think, I was probably, I think I despise Fauci more and sooner than almost anyone else that I know in the entirety of American media. Because I saw exactly who this guy was. All I had to know was the flip on the mask issue.

• 3:04:15Speaker 06

  Goes from, it's not a big deal, doesn't really work very well, you know, don't waste your time, to this is essential, if you don't do it, you're a bad person. Yeah. It was in lockstep with the psychology and the political needs of the Democrat left. That's all it was. He became a front man. He was propaganda in a lab coat. He was a tiny little tyrant doing what the collective apparatus wanted him to. And we all suffered as a result of it. And I mean, I think he's, I think he's truly shameful. I mean, I think what he did is monstrous. And I think the people who went along with it have a lot of soul searching to do. And, and they were hateful and their conduct was shameful. And the forced vaccine mandates was a disgrace.

• 3:04:58Speaker 06

  And the mask mandates on planes and in restaurants was appalling and pointless, by the way. But to me, it still goes back to, it feels like a dry run for totalitarian control in this country when the next crisis comes. I don't know, like locking up a presidential candidate in an election cycle. Let's take a break.

• 3:06:03Speaker 08

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• 3:06:37Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Buck, we're back from the break. Let's talk about Title 42, because that's coming up real quick. What's that entail?

• 3:06:45Speaker 06

  So Title 42 is a pandemic authority of the CDC that allowed them to turn away single adult male migrants under the general idea that we got a pandemic, we can't just let people into the country because, you know, pandemic is spread by people and we have to control our borders. I think that's the short version of it. What we're going to see here is that one of the only tools that they had to turn away single adult male migrants quickly, rapidly, effectively, is going to go. And so it's not like there haven't been

• 3:07:29Speaker 06

  a lot of people illegally entering the country over the last couple of years. It's been the worst the numbers have ever been. I mean, you're looking at, oh, gosh, 5.5 million, I think. And the thing about the border that is such a challenge. So there's understanding the scope of the problem, and then there's understanding the specifics of what's going wrong, right? So there's the, at the 30,000-foot level, we have an open border that is allowing for the mass violation of our sovereignty, fentanyl trafficking that is killing...

• 3:08:09Speaker 06

  Roughly 100,000 Americans a year opioids, fentanyl, heroin, some other drugs too. Human trafficking, including trafficking of children into slavery and all of this is going on. We have a massive problem with the border. So we understand that. Now we get into the why or how is it actually happening? There are a lot of open holes in the border that, well, literally in terms of not having fencing or a wall, but also in terms of policy. And the biggest one has been, and I've spent time with Border Patrol, I still am in contact with some great folks on Border Patrol. I

• 3:08:54Speaker 06

  run this stuff through them. And I'm fortunate with my radio show, I can basically ask for any policy official I want, not working for the Biden administration, but premium, they'll come on right away. So a lot of access to expertise on the on the issue of the border, which has made me learn a lot. And the asylum issue is just, that's the biggest single scam that is running right now. And I think it's important, if people understood what's really going on, then they would be able to better argue with the machinery of illegal immigration as it happens in the in the country today, and the enormous political implications and

• 3:09:38Speaker 06

  honestly, you know, nation state implications for us. So, I mean, the one thing that I think everyone needs to understand is that the whole system now is being abused so that people are entering the country with no belief that they're ever going to have to leave.

• 3:10:00Speaker 06

  How does that happen? They step into the country illegally. That's the first. The first thing is the illegal entry. Right? So they they show up. And I've seen this. I mean, I've been with Border Patrol while this has happened. And they'll surrender. Meaning you'll see a group of fifty, a hundred migrants. They'll wave down Border Patrol. People think of this as like, oh, my gosh, the cartels, the drug runners and all that. No, no, no, no. That's happening too. But vast majority of, you know, eighty, ninety percent of what you're really seeing in terms of the aggregate numbers are people who are showing up, who find a way to enter illegally, which is, I mean, it is illegal to be on the Mexican side of the border and walk on the American side.

• 3:10:44Speaker 06

  That act is a violation of American sovereignty. That act is actually against the law, which I think people have to be reminded about because this is being treated like it's not a crime anymore. Just like it is on the reverse. Yeah, of course. You can't just. Every country in the world has this. I mean, I think that's important, what you point out there, too. Every country in the world is allowed to say, these are our borders. We're not allowed to do that in Mexico. Right. We're no, we're not allowed to just go into Mexico. We're not allowed to do that to go to Canada. No. Oh, no. Oh, no. We, every country in the world is allowed to have, at least try to have, border integrity except us. And we are racist, by the way, as a country for wanting to have secure borders.

• 3:11:28Speaker 06

  That's the primary argument in a, you know, highly diverse, multi-ethnic, multinational, multi-religious country like America, just to try to say, hey, can we have control over who's coming into the country? A million people a year illegally enter America and stay in America, get, you know, green cards, citizenship, whatever, a million a year. This is just saying, hey, can we can we deal with the illegal entry? And if you bring it up, the first thing they say is that you're racist. Now, that's always interesting because, okay, racist against whom? And I'll say, oh, you're racist against Hispanic people. I said, that's interesting. There are about a hundred and sixty different countries that have had people enter the US illegally in the last year.

• 3:12:12Speaker 06

  Thailand, West Africa, Peru, Azerbaijan. Think of a country, basically. And people have tried to enter illegally from there. So this notion that, oh, you, you just don't want people from this one country or that one country to come here is a lie. But it's a very, it's a very powerful lie that the media tells everybody. And that makes a lot of people scared to understand this issue honestly and to understand what's really, what's really going on. So, so they enter illegally and then they go through this process. And remember, this is happening millions of times over. They, they say, I have a credible fear. And some of them even have little sheets of paper that have told them what to say. They've found this at the border too.

• 3:12:57Speaker 06

  They also have wristbands, as you know, I'm sure if you've talked to other people about the cartel situation, they have wristbands to show which cartel they paid off to get there. And you see these piles of wristbands. So this is now, some are estimating that they make more money from the human trafficking than the drug smuggling across the border. Depends on who's, you know, they're not keeping receipts, right? But it depends on whose numbers you ask. It's a, it's a multi-billion dollar thing that's going on here right now. And the Mexican government's basically doing nothing to stop it, as we know. And the Mexican government is effectively owned by the cartels anyway. So they, they then go into the process of saying, well, I'm seeking asylum. And just take New York City, the, the case study that I know the best.

• 3:13:37Speaker 06

  New York City now, the, the process to get your asylum claim heard is going to take basically a decade. What's going to happen between now and a decade from now? When that person may or may not even show up for their asylum hearing, there'll be a low priority for deportation. They will not, you know, so meaning unless they commit a heinous crime. And even then there'll be libs who are like, oh, like everyone should get a second chance. But they don't show up for the hearing. They have to go find the person, then they get a, they get their day in court before the asylum judge. And then there's a separate, and I, you know, some of this has, they alter this and change as they go in the process. But there's also a separate component of it, which is the deportation hearing.

• 3:14:22Speaker 06

  So the point here is that with the system as it exists today, if someone shows up at our border and says, "I have a credible fear of persecution in my country," and they pass that credible fear test, which is the most perfunctory nonsense you can imagine, to the point where the cartels are training people in all these different languages to say this, or say it in English, obviously, but training people who speak different languages. They're then gaming the whole system. They're gonna have kids here, they're gonna get married here, they're gonna work here. What are the Democrats gonna say in 10 years? They're gonna say, "This person's an American now." Now, you can argue that, someone could say to me, "You know what? That's what we want." That is not what the Democrats are saying. They say they have legal status, they say

• 3:15:05Speaker 06

  they're going through a process, and if they fail in that process, they will be deported. That is a lie. They are delaying law enforcement in action to nullify our immigration laws. They're doing this on massive scale, and they're doing this to create the biggest violation of American sovereignty and rule of law you could imagine right now at the southern border. So that's the primary scam that is underway, and it skips the legal immigration line. It makes people that went through years of applications and, you know, paying lawyers and everything to do it the legal way, the right way, makes them feel like, "I could've just walked across the border."

• 3:15:46Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:15:47Speaker 06

  And you have to remember that in the background of all this is mass amnesty, which is the ultimate plan. That was the plan of the Obama administration. If Biden wins a second term, it will be the primary focus of the Democrats. If they can get a, if they can find a way to push it through, shoehorn it through by changing the filibuster, they will, and they'll do it on this issue.

• 3:16:07Shawn Ryan?

  Why, so this expires or coming up, it might be expired by the time this actually comes out, but I got another question for you. So the border's been pretty much wide open the entire, the entire time Biden's been in office, right?

• 3:16:22Shawn Ryan?

  Now this is gonna expire. And I just saw that now they're sending, what, fifteen hundred National Guard troops down to the border to... For what? Why all of a sudden? What's the play?

• 3:16:36Speaker 06

  Optics. The play is to make it seem like the Biden administration going into the election cycle cares about the problem. There is how the Biden White House governs, and there's how the Biden White House campaigns. And this is a much broader issue even than the border, but Biden is going to run as somebody who wants to fix the border. He's going to run as somebody who wants border security. He's going to run as somebody who wants law and order on the streets of American cities. All of this is a complete slap in the face to anyone who's been awake for the last, you know, two-plus years, three years. But that's the way they're gonna do it.

• 3:17:21Speaker 06

  That's the game plan. This is a head fake. Sending National Guard to the border is a head fake that is meant to look like they're doing something to make the border better, more secure, whatever it may be. The reality of National... I've been to the... I've been at the border with, you know, National Guard guys there. See exactly what they do. They aren't securing anything. They are processing. They are helping to process arrivals. They are handing out bottles of water and, and just a presence there, doing admin effectively. They're not chasing cartel guys, they're not making arrests, they're not turning people back, none of that. So the, the popular conception of, "Let's just send the military to the border."

• 3:18:06Speaker 06

  Military, under the current regime, there's no authority to do anything at the border. The authority is to welcome the illegals and hand out bottles of water. That's the authority.

• 3:18:13Shawn Ryan?

  So they're just, they're just sending them down there for a show to, to try to convert more voters?

• 3:18:18Speaker 06

  Yeah. To make, to make it seem like they're doing something. The big challenge, the other big challenge you have...

• 3:18:23Shawn Ryan?

  How many people do you think are gonna fall for that? Because this has been going on since he got elected.

• 3:18:28Speaker 06

  How many, how many independents, and this is a depressing thought, but it's one everyone needs to remember, how many independents did they have to sway based on the official numbers in...

• 3:18:41Speaker 06

  2020 for Biden to win, you're talking about less than 100,000 people across a handful of states. So they're not always playing to.

• 3:18:49Shawn Ryan?

  How many independents do you think they did sway?

• 3:18:52Speaker 06

  Oh, God. Uh, that's a really good question. Depends on where you're asking me. I mean, look, I think that the, um, I think that they rigged the system using COVID as an excuse to change election laws in ways that are violate state law in places like Pennsylvania. I think that there was a refusal of some of the individuals in the judiciary to take on cases to look at, you know, if people are voting in Georgia in the wrong county, honest mistake, okay, fine, but those votes aren't supposed to count. And when you're talking about losing by, what, 14,000 votes, the rules are the rules, right? Didn't want to look at that.

• 3:19:36Speaker 06

  There are places where there were clear, um, there were clear failures of the system. But, you know, I, I think that when you look at the reality of the data now on independent voters, not just in 2020, but in 2022, the Republicans have a problem. We do have a problem. Uh, we have a problem with Republicans who won't vote for certain Republicans, right? That's real. People can say, oh, but, you know, get all angry about it. It's just what happened. Um, and I think the data reflects that, so.

• 3:20:09Shawn Ryan?

  I think that's, I mean, I think that's a, a huge problem and, and.

• 3:20:13Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 3:20:14Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, in my personal opinion, that could be fixed.

• 3:20:17Speaker 06

  Yeah. Um, it's something.

• 3:20:21Shawn Ryan?

  If you've pissed off the entire fucking independent voting population, then you did something wrong.

• 3:20:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:20:28Shawn Ryan?

  Would you agree with that?

• 3:20:29Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm. Look, um.

• 3:20:35Speaker 06

  There's, there are people who have been very emotionally invested, even on the right, in certain narratives of what has happened in our recent elections and what the party has become and who should lead it. And I just sit here trying to think of, how do we win so we can do the best we can to fix the country as much as we can while we can? And that's not about allegiance to one individual. It's not about allegiance to the party overall. It's just looking at what is happening and trying to do the best under the circumstances that we can. And I think that with 2022, we, we lost, like, we lost the Senate. We should have won the Senate. And then we lost the Senate because of some of the candidates

• 3:21:19Speaker 06

  being weak and also being overly focused on what happened in 2020. And people say, oh, and they get very mad about this. And I say to them, and these are my people get very mad about it. And these are my, you know, friends and colleagues and, and some of, some of my, my listeners. I say, we have to be able to have, and we have to be able to be honest with each other about how we win, what needs to happen to win, or else we just keep losing and, and become kind of victims of the system and just blaming, oh, but this is, you know, there, there were some Senate candidates in 2022 who were bad candidates and took the wrong approach. And we should learn from that instead of saying, oh, but, you know, something else. Rar Republicans. I don't like them. They

• 3:22:02Speaker 06

  didn't do the right thing. Or, you know, people just get very angry about it. Look, I got angry about it. I, I, you were with me on election night. I mean, election night was like a mule kick to the face in 2022. I was like, you've got to be kidding me. Yeah. You've got to be, I mean, look, I mean, Ron DeSantis had a huge win in Flora. And then other than that, I was looking around, I was like, every close race, every close important race, we lost, basically. You know, we won some good seats, but those are, you know, we, we thought we were going to win, you know, Ohio governorship, like, or Ohio Senate seat, rather. We thought we were going to win, you know, some, some good stuff. But, and the close ones did not work out. And I just, I mean, I'm tired of losing. That's kind of, that's my attitude. Me too. I'm tired of losing. And we do need independents, and we do need independents,

• 3:22:46Speaker 06

  not to agree with us on everything, but to agree with us enough in, in enough places that we don't have lunatics running the party.

• 3:22:56Shawn Ryan?

  Last thing I want to talk about is Ukraine and the money laundering. I hear all about the money laundering in Ukraine. I don't hear a lot about how it's being laundered. And that's, maybe that's because I'm not looking into it enough. I don't know, but I'm hoping you can explain to me. How the money is being laundered in Ukraine.

• 3:23:15Speaker 06

  You know, this is when I wish, I wish I had some of the old access, right? So I could actually start to see who's saying what to whom over there among the oligarchs and where the money's going. And it's such a difficult question because you're asking, where does it go within the system? When it goes into a system who, that exists first and foremost to hide what's going on, right? In a lot of ways. When a system is built to evade accountability and to evade transparency from thousands of miles away, how are you going to have a real view into what's happening? We know there's no accountability for the official dollars that are going into Ukraine. We also know there's a lot of stuff that's going into Ukraine that's not official.

• 3:23:59Speaker 06

  And a lot of resources and personnel and whatever.

• 3:24:03Shawn Ryan?

  Do you have any specifics?

• 3:24:06Speaker 06

  No, I, I'm not, I, I will always tell you what I know, what I don't know. I'm not as plugged into Ukraine as, as I could be, or I think I should be if I chased it more, to be honest with you. I've been, I, I care about our border more than I care about Ukraine's borders. That's been a little bit of my philosophy. And so I focus more on what's happening here with that issue, just to, and then I, you know, also the criminal justice issue in cities and, and what's happening in blue states. That's much more my focus on the, on Ukraine. I'm, I just don't want us getting drawn into another war. And that's my, you know, whether the, they're spending all this money. They shouldn't be spending all this money.

• 3:24:48Speaker 06

  We have, I think we're on the precipice of a major recession in this country right now. Maybe bring the dollars home is, seems pretty obvious. But I, I'll be honest, I don't know anyone, I hear people talking about the money laundering too. I hear people talking about all the, we know Ukraine is super corrupt. We know they've gotten a hundred and, I don't know, 20 billion dollars or something of US aid, military aid, cash, infusions, everything. Where does it all go?

• 3:25:17Speaker 06

  I don't think that the people that are supposed to know where it goes in the government even really know. So it's very difficult for us to have a better, a better sense of where those cash flows are going. I mean, obviously, a lot of it is going to artillery shells and, you know, the conflict, but they're siphoning it off to the side. Think about it this way, right? I always like to try to do, if I'm switching around, sitting on the other side of the chessboard, or just sitting in place of somebody who is playing their own chess game, like, I'll take their chair for a second. If you're a senior figure in the Ukrainian government right now, given what's going on with Russia, and you're in a country where everybody's been feathering their nests with whatever dollars they can, siphoning from the treasury, siphoning from corporate interests that are paying you off, pure old

• 3:26:02Speaker 06

  school corruption, you tell me you're not gonna make sure you're socking away some money and getting ready for the exit, right?

• 3:26:08Shawn Ryan?

  I'm with you. That's what I think's going on in the US government right now.

• 3:26:11Speaker 06

  So I, right, so I think that's happening. I just, but like, where and the mechanics of it? The motivation, you and I can agree, is there. And so the reality is almost certainly there, but the specifics of, of how they're doing it, I mean, I wish I could know. And I just also feel like, I wish they would just tell everybody, we're in for a few trillion dollars on this one. Because that's what it actually is. I'm not saying it's a few trillion spent already, but I'm saying, the way this conflict is going, the duration of the conflict as it's likely to play out, you're looking at a few trillion dollars. And that's the best case scenario of, we don't get somehow dragged into this thing,

• 3:26:50Speaker 06

  and it goes, you know, thermonuclear, I mean, which is everyone's, well, it should be everyone's worst nightmare.

• 3:26:57Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think we're heading into World War III?

• 3:27:02Speaker 06

  Oh, man. I think that the chance of a direct escalation with Russia is probably...

• 3:27:16Speaker 06

  Ten to twenty percent. And that's enough that I think people should be really worried about it. So I think it's unlikely, but realistic. And when it's realistic and it involves something that's that significant and dangerous, people should be much more cognizant of the mission creep toward this and the way that this could go bad in a hurry. I mean, they just, before we got in touch, they're talking about, oh, there was an attempt on Putin's life with drones. I'm like, whoa, hmm? And you gotta remember, you know this, right? You know this from the agency side, because we get a, you, when you work in the world of, you know, tradecraft and espionage and all that stuff, you have a, have a sense for

• 3:27:57Speaker 06

  how, what a bunch of cold SOBs, the Soviets now, the, you know, Russian services are Russian FSB and all that.

• 3:28:08Speaker 06

  I mean, they, they blew up an apartment building full of Russians to invade Chechnya. Like, I think that's pretty well established. Total, people yell about false flags. And I think sometimes, you know, they think, oh, come on, that's a, they exist. It does happen. And the Russians, they know how to do that kind of stuff. They do that kind of stuff. And so that's why when people say, it's not just what we want, it's what they want, or how they want to draw us in, or how they want to respond. And that's, that's where I get really worried. And I, I don't hear, I, I mean, do you ever hear anyone on, on, on either side, honestly, ever talk about how this thing ends? No.

• 3:28:48Speaker 06

  And we just, and so I sat here, I told you, and I was a little, you know, little, little analyst in Afghanistan, trying to learn about what's going on in that country. I, I knew then, and everyone that I thought who understood the country well was, just the mission there wasn't going to work. It just wasn't going to happen. Not with the Pakistani sanctuary next door, not with the, you know, the history and culture of Afghanistan as it pertains to a central government. We could go, you know, talk about that for three hours. It just wasn't going to happen. So I sit here and I say, what is our obligation to make sure that we speak the truth, even if it is shouted down from people that are supposedly the smartest, the most knowledgeable, the ones that, you know, really care about Ukraine?

• 3:29:31Speaker 06

  Because this stuff, as you know, can change in a heartbeat. And all of a sudden, it's gone from, we have to support the brave Ukrainian resistance to, you know what, we really do need that no-fly zone. Or you know what, we really do need to establish safe haven corridors with US troops deployed to enforce them, you know, west of Kiev and, you know, and then, then things go on from there. We have learned a very painful lesson with how useless sanctions are. Again, they're basically, this is amazing, isn't it? We're always like, oh, well, we're gonna slap them around with sanctions.

• 3:30:05Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 3:30:06Speaker 06

  Really? You gonna slap Russia around with sanctions? The hydrocarbon superpower that in a world where the economy still absolutely, positively needs natural gas and, and, and oil, you're gonna do what exactly? And we've learned. At the beginning of this conflict, we were told we're gonna crush their economy. We didn't crush their economy. The really smart people who tell us we're not gonna get in a war with Russia, they said we're gonna be able to bring Russia to its knees by cutting them off from the international banking system. Does Russia look like it's been brought to its knees by the international banking system?

• 3:30:39Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I like what, I guess I shouldn't say I like, but I think Elon Musk, he brought up a great point when we mub and eyes the US dollar and with all these sanctions and everything, and now look what's happened, and now Brexit's taken off and all these countries are dropping the dollar, Argentina, France is talking about it, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Iran, who else? Who am I missing?

• 3:31:00Speaker 06

  I mean, that's, that's a strong list of, of people that are, are moving. If, if dollar, if the dollar no longer is the global reserve currency, we live in a very different country with a very different standard of living pretty much overnight. And now you wanna talk about social upheaval and what's possible in a totalitarian future?

• 3:31:23Speaker 06

  Look at how much some of the most wealthy and educated nation states in the world over the last hundred years have changed over periods of a couple of decades. But the belief that we are above the fray with all of that will always be the shining light of freedom, the red, white, and blue, only if we do the right things.

• 3:31:47Shawn Ryan?

  What do you know about the bio labs in Ukraine? I hear a lot about the bio labs. I don't know a lot about them. People, I just hear a lot of blurbs. I don't, I don't hear a lot of people dive in on these subjects. I just hear a lot of buzzwords.

• 3:32:04Speaker 06

  I mean, I, I don't have, this is where I should be like, Sean, I can neither confirm nor deny. I'm not read into that program, you know, but I honestly don't really know much about the bioweapon labs or whatever they, you know, whatever the reporting is on that. I've just, I've just seen what you've seen. I, I'll be honest with you, I haven't really, in my work, I haven't really followed events in Ukraine as closely, certainly as I did Iraq, Afghanistan, and places like that, having spent time in those places. Because I just view it as we're in a proxy war and it's going to continue, it's going to go on for years, and it's really for us, don't get drawn into the war, try to stop

• 3:32:49Speaker 06

  the money spigot from being crazy, and try to stop us from destroying the dollar on our own economy in the process. Because I never hear anyone say, even people that are skeptical of, of our plan in Ukraine, I never hear them say, publicly at least, well, what, what do we do? Even some of the Republican members of Congress, do we just, do we, do we just stop giving Ukraine anything? Is that the plan? If someone feels that way, I think the first step would be they got to start saying this, right? If they just said, you know, Ukraine is on its own. Is that the policy? Or is the policy mitigating our, our involvement and making sure that we don't get drawn into the disaster wholesale?

• 3:33:27Speaker 06

  So, but I, I, I have very little faith in the people making the decisions about the issue, that they know what they're doing and that they're exercising judgment and wisdom.

• 3:33:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I don't either.

• 3:33:45Shawn Ryan?

  I don't have any faith in it at all. But, um, what do you think's gonna happen in the next year?

• 3:33:51Speaker 06

  Oh, man.

• 3:33:52Shawn Ryan?

  With the election coming up? What do we need to look out for?

• 3:33:56Speaker 06

  I think you're heading into a-

• 3:33:57Shawn Ryan?

  Are we gonna see the BLM and Antifa and all this other shit all over again? Is that coming?

• 3:34:04Speaker 06

  That's interesting.

• 3:34:07Speaker 06

  I think the primary plan for the left is going to be the legal effort against Trump is much more serious than most people realize. And I mean, most Trump supporters realize. This is a decision that I think has really already been made. That this is what they're gonna do. Um, I think the people in place have no problem using their prosecutorial authority and using the judiciary as a weapon of politics. And I think that if they, you know, they've also set a standard whereby they can use the system, the machinery of the government

• 3:34:50Speaker 06

  in a way to crush dissent in a way that, uh,

• 3:34:57Speaker 06

  could be really, really frightening, um, down the line. Because let's say you have, and I hope this is wrong, but maybe everything's gonna be fine and, you know, we'll be sitting here, you know, smoking cigars and celebrating the victory of the republic and everything's fine, but, um, I think that it's more likely you'll see, um, multiple efforts to prosecute Trump as the Republican nominee. And then there'll be all discussion as to whether or not they can even try to imprison him. I think that the polarization and the, uh-

• 3:35:32Speaker 06

  The impact that will have on the country will be massive even by our current standards. I think people will just be in a bit of a state of shock over it. And then some who want to, you know, protest more, take to the streets, speak about this on our side, will of course create, as always happens, the opening for the other side, which always has the floodgates of activist, maniac, Antifa, BLM riot, or all that stuff, ready to go at a moment's notice. And, and so then that becomes perhaps the excuse for that to put us into a state of,

• 3:36:14Speaker 06

  of heightened anxiety. I mean, remember, you know, you know this from how they try to break people down in interrogations, right? You create psychological isolation, anguish, and, and just apply pressure. And over time, when you apply pressure, people become less rational, they become less reasonable, they're more, they're more suggestible to extreme ideas and extreme ideology. And I, I think that that's going to be part of the, a big part of the playbook to stay in power for 2024. And I hope to God that I am wrong and that they don't really go for the prosecution

• 3:36:57Speaker 06

  of Trump and they don't try to effectively subvert a, an election from happening in a presidential year. And if that's the case, still a lot of other things to worry about, but that will be good. But I, I see, I see them prosecuting Trump and that taking us into completely uncharted territory. I don't know where, they've already prosecuted, to be clear, right? They've already brought a criminal charge, but I mean, ramping it up substantially. Yeah. And taking it to a place where no one really can understand where that's going to go and where that takes the country politically. I mean, if I had told somebody in 2019, we're going to be locked into our homes, we're going to be forced to act like, you know, there's a, there's a plague out there that

• 3:37:40Speaker 06

  could kill us at any moment, and there will be mobs of lunatics in major American cities.

• 3:37:48Speaker 06

  Rampaging, rampaging through neighborhoods, destroying and looting stores, pulling down monuments and statues and breaking them up, rioting outside the White House, rioting and, you know, you'll say that I was crazy. Welcome to 2020. So I think we have to see the next time around. Be ready for things to get wild. That's what I think is gonna happen.

• 3:38:14Shawn Ryan?

  Great.

• 3:38:17Speaker 06

  But it's all gonna be okay. That's why you pray, you spend time with your family, spend time with loved ones, read good books, think worthwhile thoughts. You know, we are still the best country in the world, which I think says a lot of the time more about other countries than it does about us. But we're still number one, so we got that. We got that going for us, which is nice.

• 3:38:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:38:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:38:38Shawn Ryan?

  Well, Buck, you got anything cool coming up?

• 3:38:41Speaker 06

  No, I just, you know, your, your audience has, has excellent taste. So if they have any room to add to the, the, the content docket, you know, please check out, we do a radio show every day, Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. We're on, I mean, I don't know, 500 stations, give or take, so pretty much everywhere. We're on the iHeart app, you can listen in. I talk about this stuff all the time, three hours a day with Clay and, and we're trying to save the, and people ask me what I do for a living and I say this, I'm only half kidding, I'm trying to save the country. So I hope some of your folks will check out the show.

• 3:39:14Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I'm sure they will. All the links will be in the description and, hey man, it was a real honor interviewing you.

• 3:39:21Speaker 06

  Thank you very much, sir. Honored to be here. I really was looking forward to it, so it's been really cool.

• 3:39:26Shawn Ryan?

  Hope to see you again. Cheers.